After seeking a prospective buyer for the building twice in the last three years, New Canaan’s highest elected official said last week that the town may keep a ca.-1859 building that long has formed part of the Town Hall campus.
The town first issued a request for proposals from potential buyers of Vine Cottage in June 2019. Two years later, in August 2021, First Selectman Kevin Moynihan said the town had terminated its negotiations with a developer interested in the property and would reissue the RFP. The Board of Selectmen approved the issuance of the RFP the following month, but it has since closed, officials said during the selectmen’s Feb. 22 meeting.
“It may be we are going to retain Vine Cottage for the Health Department,” Moynihan said during the meeting, held at Town Hall and via videoconference. “We just don’t know yet.”
It isn’t clear what parties responded to the reissued RFP. When Selectman Nick Williams asked about the status of the RFP, Moynihan responded, “We discussed that in executive session.” (Real estate transactions may discussed out of the public eye, under state sunshine laws.)
Williams said, “I know we did. We discussed certain offers.”
Moynihan responded, “It’s done.”
Located at 61 Main St. across from the fire station, Vine Cottage is a turreted, yellow building that the town has owned since 1997. It currently is occupied by the New Canaan Health Department.
In early 2017, a proposal to renovate the building for $550,000 was rejected by the Town Council. Some in town suggested that the true cost of maintaining it might be as low as $220,000. In the summer of 2018, Moynihan said that the building would likely be sold, and though then-Selectman Kit Devereaux pushed back on the move, the selectmen voted 2-1 in June 2019 to approve the RFP. A field of four interested parties was narrowed down to two contenders, Robert Cuda and Arnold Karp, Moynihan has said. Cuda died in December 2019, and the negotiations with Karp—owner of the former Red Cross building next door—slowed amid the pandemic, town officials said.
Last week’s discussion about Vine Cottage came as the selectmen voted 3-0 to approve a $13,000 contract for an emergency generator at Vine Cottage. According to Public Works Director Tiger Mann, “Right now we are being told by Eversource that the potential for rolling blackouts—and it doesn’t matter if we’re a critical facility or not, it means that if they think the grid is going down during either this heating season or during the summer, they will give us about an hour’s notice and then start to roll it out. So all of our critical facilities necessarily need to have a backup generator, the Health Department has refrigerators there with vaccines and other important items that we don’t necessarily want to rush through, plus the refrigerators are very sensitive so if we put in a generator that gives us a little bit of bad energy, that theoretically could throw us off.”
I really hope you retain Vine Cottage – yes please! It is such a beautiful central focal point. It needs to be under the watchful eye of the town, not sold to a party which may not treat it with the respect that such an antique building deserves.
Of course do repairs and upkeep – all building need that and especially such a special historic one as this. The maintenance will be much less than it was thought if you chose the right people for the job.
Maybe we can put the vines back that originally gave it its name – just a few.
It seems every time you lift up a rock, you find Arnold.
I’m sure Karp will find a way to squeeze 50 apartments in there.
Let’s make every effort to utilize the properties the town owns. Town services need offices and if we don’t use our existing properties we will simply need to pay rents. However, if there is no practical use for the property than let’s do our best not to sell properties that could have immediate adverse potential 830-G implications. This would mean at a minimum these property sales can at least wait until the 830-G moratorium application is submitted and is re-established. Some of these developers likely have plans drawn up during the RFP process and will submit applications minutes after they close on the properties. Let’s do our best not to give developers further opportunity to destroy the character of our town.