The property at 4 Second St., directly adjacent to the Fire station and the District headquarters building, was put up for sale by its owner in mid-January, with an asking price of $439,900. The listing agent is R. Mansfield and Associates.

I contacted all of the Board members either by phone or in person to determine whether or not this opportunity was something we should pursue. The overwhelming response was that we definitely should, but not at the asking price. Instead, we all agreed that we should go in with an offer of $335,000, with the understanding with the seller that, no matter what our initial or any subsequent offer might be, no purchase could be made until and unless we had submitted the issue to the taxpayers and had obtained their approval. We assured the seller that, once he had accepted an offer, we would call a Special Meting of the taxpayers to present the issue to them within four weeks of the day that we reached an agreement on the purchase price.

We have had several offers and counter offers since this process began. AS of last week, our offer of $390,000 was accepted. (This price, by the way, was slightly under a drive by appraisal of $400,000 that we obtained from a local appraiser.) So, it is now time for us to call the Special Meeting, which we have scheduled for 1:00PM Saturday, March 24, 2007. I recognize it is unusual for us to call a Special Meeting, especially during the winter, but it would not be fair to the seller to have him wait until June for this to be voted on by the taxpayers at the Annual Meeting. As a matter of fact, I do not think he would even have negotiated with us if that were the case. We hope that, be scheduling this meeting in early afternoon, we can get a good turnout from residents living in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York. Of course, we hope our local folks will turn out in large numbers. We recognize that many of you may be wintering in the South or for whatever other reason and will not be able to attend. While only voting in person is permitted, we would welcome your written or telephone input if you are unable to attend in person. While this form of communication is not binding, it would be good to have an idea of how you feel about this. If you care to use the email, the address is moderator@misquamicutfiredistrict.org. My home phone is 401.596.9206.

Why does the Board think we should buy this property? Well, if you look at where we are today, we are really landlocked. We just about fill all the land with the building and have virtually no room for expansion. Do we intend to expand? No, not at the present time, but if that became a requirement sometime in the future, we would probably have to move to some other bigger location. Having this Second St. property in hand would give us the opportunity to stay here.

The house is livable. We expect that we could rent or lease it on a year-round basis; we will not get into a summer rental situation. We would keep a tenant as long as the house is safe and structurally sound and/or until we need it for our own purposes. Meanwhile, we could get some additional parking and would probably use the garage for storage.

We forecast that we will generate about $8 to $9,000 per year in rental income. Anticipated expenses will be n the $6,000 range, including $4,000 in taxes and $1,000 in insurance (which could go up based on what’s happening to shoreline coverage).

How do we intend to pay for it? Presently, we have given the seller a $5,000 deposit which will be returned if the taxpayers do not approve the deal. Of the remaining $385,000, we propose using $185,000 from some of our reserve accounts, leaving a balance of $200,000. We propose having a 20 year mortgage to fund this balance. This could cost us about $20,000 per year. This would end up adding about $.04 to the current tax rate. However, the final determination of how we fund this obligation is yours. If you approve the purchase, then you also have to approve the financing. But the foregoing is what your Board of Directors suggests, based on our Treasurer’s recommendation. We have not yet contacted a mortgage source so we don’t know what the mortgage rate will be.

If you want to play around with some different estimates of how to fund the financing, you can use the following rule of thumb: Each $1,000 per year in expenditures equals $.0019 in the tax rate.

The Board of Directors has given their complete support to the purchase and strongly recommends it to our taxpayers.

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