NAHANT — During the annual Town Meeting on May 17 at Town Hall, after voting to amend the vote taken under Article 20 of the 2021 Town Meeting, the Select Board will now have until July 1, 2029, to sell the remaining Coast Guard Housing property lots.
The amendment of the article pushed back the date by which the lots must be sold, pushing the deadline from 2027 to 2029.
Article 19 reads: “To see if the town will vote to amend the vote taken under article 20 of the 2021 Annual Town Meeting, to now authorize the Select Board to sell the remaining unsold Coast Guard housing lots free of limitations on the number of offerings, provided, however, that the remaining lots are sold by July 1, 2027, subject to the other restrictions set forth in said 2021 vote, or take any action relative thereto.”
The motion was seconded, and it opened up to public discussion on the matter. Resident Ken Carangelo said, “Once we got into a groove of getting these sold, they went in a matter of months, which is awesome… We’re down to two left. What’s the rationale for having four years to sell the additional two?”
Town Administrator Tony Barletta responded to Carangelo’s comment.
“As stated, the original article moved that these properties be sold in two years in two offerings. The first offering started in September 2024,” Barletta said. “That timeline, as it stands today, is September 2026… We’ve put properties out twice, and we’ve already maximized our number of offerings authorized by that article. We prefer not to have to ask for additional offerings in the future.”
Barletta said that the town was initially going to add only two years to the September 2026 date. “In the very unlikely chance that we don’t have those two lots sold by 2028, we moved it to July 2029 to get it on the other side of that spring Town Meeting,” Barletta added. “So, if we needed to ask for more time, we could just ask you again in the spring of 2029 — but hopefully, we won’t need that.”
Barletta noted there’s still a process to go through with one of the properties, followed by demolition and preparation to put it up for sale. “Of course, there’s always the unknown of the economy and the housing market, so we wanted to give ourselves enough time to keep moving forward… But the intent here is to put them up for sale as soon as possible, and get this project completed.”
Carangelo followed up with another question, asking why it wouldn’t be possible to simply add two more years and then return to Town Meeting if necessary.
“You could, but we wanted to instead of bringing it up again, we wanted to give the town plenty of time to get this done,” Barletta said. He said that out of the 11 lots put up for sale, 10 have already been sold.
“We’ve brought in a little over $5.1 million, as mentioned earlier, the original loan is paid off, and the second loan will be paid off in July of this year,” Barletta said. “Once you have all those funds committed to paying off the debt, which is the total of $3.166 million — the town will have about $1.9 million left over in revenue to the town.”
If the properties left to sell are sold around the same market value as the other lots, the town could be looking at nearly $3 million in revenue to the town. “With this motion, we’re looking to continue that effort,” Barletta said. “We want to get them sold as fast as possible… but I just wanted to be cautious about the time limit.”
Carangelo said that the town is at the end of a multi-decade process of trying to dispose of these (lots). “So, I would motion to amend this article, to have the date be July 1, 2027, not 2029,” he said. “And if they’re not sold by 2027, you can always ask for more time… But it seems like four years is an awfully long time to leave this open-ended.”
The town voted on the motion to change the date from 2029 to 2027 — and after a vote of 39% in favor and 61% against, the motion failed.
Then, the town voted on Article 19. It passed with 105 yes to 16 no.
