Land Acquistion By The Town Of Holden Of The Reed Rico Building

Few years back I was on a committee for a new DPW building, which started with trying to 
find the best location.  Berkshire Hathaway, who owned Reed Rico, called and offered their site on Industrial Drive in Holden for FREE!!!  It was the perfect location and FREE!!

We of course jumped and took the deal right??  

No!!!  
In fact just the opposite:

1. We spent literally 4 or 5 months working on an LDA (Land Disposition Agreeement) that crossed all the T's and dotted all the I's.
2. We had our environmental people look at all the case history on the land to determine our risk.
3. We even bout an environmental insurance policy for about $40,000 per year to insure against any unknown risks

It was only then that it went to Town Meeting for a vote as whether or not we accept the gift.   The vote passed and the Town of Holden took the property for FREE!!

The next step was to collect estimates to build a new DPW building on the site and present them at a second Town Meeting, where it was approved.   Today, the new DPW building is going up.   
 We always ran the risk that at the second meeting, the vote could have been defeated.  Our feelings were that it was still worth accepting the gift of the land, since it was a good deal after weighing all the risks.   


Now compare this process to the building of Polar Park in Worcester.   

• To date there have been no signed LDA's (Land Disposition Agreements). In fact we do not even own the land.   
• To date we have not signed Private Development Agreements with Madison, whose 90 million of  Phase I investments that were projected to completed by January 2021 to make the project revenue "neutral".

Despite that we 1) do not own the land and 2) have not Private Developer Agreements, we  move forward spending $110,000,000, latest estimate.       We hope this works.....