NAUGATUCK — Investors are interested in purchasing two municipal buildings that the borough is actively trying to sell, officials say.
Ron Pugliese, president and chief executive officer of the quasi-public Naugatuck Economic Development Corporation, said the group’s board will hear proposals from buyers interested in the Prospect Street School and the former train station on Water Street. They will hear the plans Monday in executive session during a meeting at 5:30 p.m. at Naugatuck Town Hall.
“I am excited that we have offers because we’ve worked really hard and showed the buildings more than 100 times,” Pugliese said. “While I’m excited, I’m going to reserve judgment on the offers until the board members see them and decide how they want to proceed.”
While he declined to discuss specifics of the offers or who made them, Pugliese discussed them in general terms. He said the proposed buyer for Prospect Street School, which Naugatuck stopped using as an educational facility four years ago, wants to build what the buyer described as “luxury apartments” within the building.
He said there have been multiple offers to put a restaurant in the train station, which once housed the now-defunct Naugatuck Daily News and is currently home to the Naugatuck Historical Society and a small office for the NEDC.
Pugliese said the proposals would bring tax revenue and jobs to the local economy.
“I want to be clear that we’re not talking about hundreds of jobs, but they are jobs,” he said.
The 41,000-square-foot school at 100 Prospect St., or Route 69, is appraised at $2.2 million, according to Naugatuck land records. The 12,140-square-foot former train station is appraised at $951,000, land records state.
The asking price for the train station is $600,000, while the asking price for the school is $900,000, according to the website of commercial real estate broker Tom Hill III, who has both properties listed.
Pugliese declined to state what the proposed buyers have offered for those buildings.
“I’ve never thought about the actual asking price because that is not as important as what goes into the buildings,” Pugliese said.
The school was built in 1953. The former train station’s history dates back to the early 1900s, when it had many riders traveling to and from Fairfield County and New York City. Around 1908, John H. Whittemore, a businessman and Naugatuck philanthropist, commissioned well-known architect Henry Bacon of McKim, Mead and White of New York to design a new train station that would fit with his plan for distinctive downtown district. The style of the building has been described as Spanish Colonial Revival, and also as Italian Villa style, according to the blog Historic Buildings of Connecticut.
The borough has a plan for the historical society to move next year into the Tuttle Building at 380 Church St., which is currently home of the Naugatuck Board of Education. The school board’s central office will move into Naugatuck High School in December 2015 after the school’s ongoing $81 million renovation project is completed.
