Town OKs property purchase

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Prospect voters approved the purchase of the home and land at 3 Center St. at a town meeting in October. The town currently owns much of the property along Center Street, which is considered the center of town. The closing for the property is expected to take place in early November. –LUKE MARSHALL
Prospect voters approved the purchase of the home and land at 3 Center St. at a town meeting in October. The town currently owns much of the property along Center Street, which is considered the center of town. The closing for the property is expected to take place in early November. –LUKE MARSHALL

PROSPECT — The town has taken a step closer to owning all of the properties along Center Street.

Residents approved the purchase of the house and property at 3 Center St. for $220,000 at a town meeting Oct. 21.

Town Council member Theresa Graveline, who chairs the council’s land acquisition subcommittee, said the town had been in talks with James and Barbara Brundage, who own the property, about buying the land for more than 20 years.

Graveline said the Brundages told the town on numerous occasions that they would like to sell the land to the town when they moved.

Barbara Brundage said she and her husband, James, chose to sell the house now because they were downsizing to a smaller home in Cheshire. She said the couple offered the property to the town because they knew the town owns much of the land along Center Street.

“We thought that would be the ideal thing to do,” Brundage said.

Graveline said the town had an appraisal done, which came back at $200,000. The Brundage family also had a market analysis done, which came back at $229,000, she said.

Graveline said the town decided to compromise and put in an offer of $220,000, which was accepted.

Both the town and the Brundages were pleased with the offer.

“We talked about it and determined it was more valuable to us to have control of it than as a residential property,” Graveline said. “That extra 10 percent was worth it.”

To pay for the purchase the town used $70,000 from its Land Acquisition Fund and bonded the other $150,000 along with the $500,000 road bond at 1.15 percent interest, Graveline said.

The property is 0.28 acres and has a 2,000-squarefoot house and a garage on it.

Mayor Robert Chatfield said the living and dining rooms of the house will be used for meeting rooms, since the town sometimes does not have enough meeting space. The upstairs of the house and the garage will be used for storage, he said.

The closing is expected to happen in early November, he said.

This is not the first property the town has bought along Center Street. In fact, the town owns most of the properties along the street.

“It has been the policy of the town to purchase land on Center Street, which we consider the center of town, whenever a piece of property comes available,” Chatfield said.

Chatfield said this plan started with the purchase of the property where Community School now sits in the 1930s.

In the late 1980s the town started purchasing more land on Center Street when it bought the property where the library is located. After that more properties began to come on the market and the town purchased the Grange, the property where the senior center is, and a few other properties along the road owned by a single family.

There are only a few properties along Center Street the town does not own, including the Prospect Congregational Church and a residential property listed at 27 New Haven Road. The backyard of the residential property is located along Center Street.

The town also doesn’t own the Community School property. The school will be closed when the new Prospect Elementary School opens in the fall of 2015. The town has expressed interested in buying the land from Region 16, which oversees schools in Beacon Falls and Prospect.

Chatfield is happy to say the town owns most of what it considers its downtown area.

“Other towns would like to own more property in their center,” Chatfield said.