Contamination at the Town Garage was well known to the purchasers who rushed to beat the Village in buying the land–hoping to make a substantial profit when they then sold it to the Village. They own it. It should be their responsibility for cleaning it up before selling it to the Village at a handsome profit. Is the Village going to subtract the cost of cleanup from the eventual purchase price? Or are we paying a premium to purchase the land and then must add cleanup costs to that? The lawyer groups were in such a rush to buy–why aren’t they being forced to do the cleanup? A homeowner with a leaking oil tank can’t just pass that cost on to the buyer, so why are we cleaning up land we don’t own?
If true another rotten deal for the taxpayers account.How about instead
we sue them to ensure a proper cleanup and pollution mitigation is made.
Ridgewood taxpayers have frankly had enough of these types of unmanaged exposures .lets grow up and enforce a mandated cleanup
at owners expense.If they declares bankruptcy we are no better or worse off than today.
I believe the property is owned by some LLC or a corporation and the town is afraid that if they push the issue they will just go bankrupt. So the town will pick up the tab.
11:01. Then let it rot..if someone wants it bad enough they will buy it and clean it up..we should order them to demo raise the structure as a condemned unsafe structure in the meantime
I don’t get it. Did the Village originally sell the contaminated Town Garage land to the present owners. Naughty naughty. It should have been cleaned up before being sold originally.
continued from above.
If the Village didn’t originally own the land, but lost the sale, still there should have been LAWS governing contaminated land, and LAWS inspecting land before purchasing as there is house inspection laws before sale of house.
you can’t hide from liability just through an llc
11:01 – If they do go bankrupt, then the asset will go up for bid. Assuming that cost of clean-up is greater than the value of land, there will be no bidders and the town can but the lot for a nominal amount. Which will be better than buying the same lot at a higher price from the current owner pre-BK.
Same “knowledge” can be said of the Village. You own it, you have its liability. Check the property’s purchase and sale agreement to see if seller sold as is or if there was any indemnities by seller to the Village for environmental liabilities. Putting the parking garage project aside, I would like to think that there is some real estate expertise resides within the Village’s resources.
Last I heard an LLC or such owned it. Did they manage to pass it off to the town w/o cleaning it? The Village would be nuts to have bought it in an “as is” condition. The owner of the Town Garage property was bought out by the LLC (?) with little or no warning. I assume he sold “as is” because he really had not planned on selling it. I hope they didn’t make a tidy profit by selling it “as is” to the town. Or worse, the Village cleaning it up for the present owners with a deal to then buy it at a reasonable price.