MARBLETOWN, NY – State Supreme Court Justice David Gandin has dismissed a petition that would have forced city officials to schedule a referendum on the proposed $327,000 sale of a former fire station and one-room schoolhouse.
In the August 2 decision, it was agreed that 25 of the petition’s 186 signatures should be declared invalid. This leaves the petition four signatures short of the 165 required for a public vote.
“(Supervisor Richard Parete) correctly finds that all 10 signatures on page 1 are defective because no valid date is provided in the testimony,” Gandin wrote. “For similar reasons, the 10 signatures on page 18 and the 5 on page 29 are defective because the full date of certification of the signatures is missing.”
Parete had tried to have 43 signatures declared invalid, but Gandin stopped this when the number reached a point where the petition would have been rejected.
“The referendum petition contains a maximum of 161 valid signatures,” Gandin wrote. “This is below the minimum number of signatures required to hold a referendum on the contested decision. Therefore, the plaintiff’s remaining allegations regarding the adequacy of the referendum petition are academic in nature.”
On April 29, City Council members approved the sale of the 0.37-acre property at 535 N. Marbletown Road to Leif Erin Anderson McLlwaine of Brooklyn, but on May 28 the application was delivered to them one day before the 30-day deadline to request a referendum expired.
The building, which currently has a footprint of 25,000 square feet, was a one-classroom school until 1950. A few years later, it was taken over by firefighters, who built additions to house a vehicle bay and assembly room. It was decommissioned as a station when the city consolidated its fire services in 2022, and was never equipped with full sewerage that would allow for residential or numerous commercial uses.
“The city council has discussed it and we just don’t see any use that the city needs the property for,” Parete said. “There is absolutely no use and we don’t want to maintain a building that we don’t need. … We’ve discussed it for a couple of months and looked at options and we all agree that we just don’t want to incur the cost of maintaining a building that we’re not going to use.”
Among the objections to the proposed sale were concerns from former city landmarks commission member Laura Shaine Cunningham, who said in April that the building was older than the 1832 date listed on a plaque. She cited an August 1763 letter from Charles DeWitt that referenced the building.
Cunningham, who served on the city’s Historic Preservation Commission but was not re-elected in January, proposed using the building as a tourist information center.
However, board members believe that the proceeds from a sale could be used for infrastructure projects.
This was the second attempt to sell the property with an offer of $330,000 approved on November 21, 2023 and there was no objection to the sale. However, this sale never came to fruition as the prospective buyer decided not to proceed after signing the contract.
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