Midas Property

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Author Message   nwyave Citizen Username: Mesh Post Number: 91 Registered: 1-2003 Posted on Monday, August 11, 2003 - 10:29 pm:        Mark, That whole article in the NR this week regarding the Midas property was confusing, but appeared disappointing. Is my understanding correct - It appears that we bonded and purchased a property for $100k more (560k) than it was sold for back just 3 months earlier (back in 2000). Now the town has the property, is paying interest on the notes, is losing $24,700/yr in taxes and can't sell the property - at least via auction. $24,700 x 3 years (2000-03), means the town is out 75k, plus the debt financing costs. None of this is mentioning that we paid $100k more 3 months after the property was sold. Just to make sure that this passed the smell test (sure, it did, but want to confirm) - Were there any related parties involved in the buy/sell transactions here - or all totally 3rd party buyers and sellers. Whats going on here? Could you please clarify. This is particularly haunting to me, when I recall that one of the reasons that our muni taxes are going up so much this year (5% vs MW being flat) is debt finance costs. Thanks for any clarification here.   mrosner Citizen Username: Mrosner Post Number: 548 Registered: 4-2002 Posted on Tuesday, August 12, 2003 - 11:43 am:        Nwyave: I will agree the N-R article was confusing. I am pretty interested in their timing. They know that there are several interested parties who wanted to negotiate terms and price. Not helpful to negotiate when the N-R is printing misleading information. We had to pay market value for the property. Two assesments were done, both of which were higher than what the village paid. At the time, there were several reasons why we thought we were going to need the property. The person who purchased the property just prior to the village had had a contract for almost one year. When he found out the village had an interest in it, he closed on the deal and turned around and sold it. It is very misleading to talk about the taxes of a municipality when only comparing one year. If you look at the past 5 years or even 10 years, you will see that most municipalites in Essex County are very similar (in terms of increases). Maplewood had a much larger increase two years ago.