It’s been a year, get on with parcel sale

A year ago this week, Town of Berlin officials announced they had reached an agreement with Palmer and Sandy Gillis to sell a 9.35-acre piece of the Heron Park tract to their company, Coastal Ventures Properties.

The plan back then was that the deal for $1.2 million would fulfill what Mayor Zack Tyndall referred to at the time as a “long mission of ours to revitalize that property.” Few people, if any at all, would disagree with that, since Parcel 57, as it’s known, just might be the single ugliest piece of real estate in town.

It’s a blight and an embarrassment, which makes one wonder how the nature of the disagreement between the two parties became so overwhelming that  Coastal Ventures is on the precipice of walking away 12 months after the deal was struck.

What, for Berlin’s elected officials, can be more important than getting that albatross off the municipality’s neck? Nothing comes to mind considering there don’t appear to be any prospective buyers standing outside Town Hall ready to jump in with a better offer.

It could be that someone is concerned that Coastal Ventures might get more out of this arrangement than the Town Council agreed to a year ago.

But so what? If the Gillises do come away with more than the town intended, the whole point of this exercise is to prevent the town from being stuck with these derelict buildings and grounds for years to come.

That’s why the town is kidding itself if it thinks it’s negotiating from a position of strength. A collapse of this agreement with Coastal Ventures would saddle the town with a piece of real estate that will be increasingly difficult to unload ever with a bad taste in the mouth for anyone in the future.

So give the prospective buyers an official plat of the property to take to settlement and get this thing done.