GREENFIELD — The city will pay for the milling and overlay of the Legion Avenue parking lot — the funding for which City Council declined in the fiscal year 2023 budget process — after receiving a demand letter from an attorney representing its owner.
“It’s already been paid for,” Mayor Roxann Wedegartner said Wednesday, explaining the revised $31,000 request will be paid out of the highway contracted services line of the Department of Public Works’ fiscal year 2023 budget. “The work is getting done.”
Public Works Director Marlo Warner II — who explained an excess from salaries for positions that weren’t filled for the whole year or part of the year was moved into contracted services — said under the agreement, it’ll be up to the property owner when the work gets done.
In a June letter to Wedegartner, Attorney Patrick Markey of Markey Barrett PC wrote that while the owner, Timothy Grader, with whom the city has an active lease agreement, would prefer to “work this matter out amicably,” legal action would be taken if the city failed to respond to the demand letter.
“Relying in good faith on promises made by (former Mayor William Martin) that the lot would be repaired and renovated at the city’s expense, my client entered into a no-rent lease with the city of Greenfield on Dec. 31, 2019,” Markey wrote to Wedegartner on June 13. “The city did in fact begin repairs, removing various semi-permanent barriers from the space. Unfortunately, it has not completed the repairs, and the removal of the barriers left the parking lot in worse condition than it had been before the city initiated repairs and renovations commenced.”
In the letter, Grader offered to reduce the amount requested for milling and overlay of the Legion Avenue parking lot from $60,000 to $31,000.
Markey’s letter followed a May City Council meeting where councilors defeated a reconsidered motion to appropriate $60,000 for the project, citing doubts as to the binding nature of the agreement signed by Martin and arguing taxpayer money should not be spent on private property.
The motion to reconsider — which was filed earlier that month by Precinct 4 Councilor John Bottomley — followed April’s City Council budget hearing, during which a motion to appropriate the money failed, having received only seven votes in favor. Nine votes, or a majority, would have been required to pass.
In the days after that budget hearing, Wedegartner located a letter written to Robert Cohn, the former property owner. Wedegartner explained to councilors that the agreement in the letter, “traveled with the property when it changed hands” in the same way the lease agreement did.
Reporter Mary Byrne can be reached at mbyrne@recorder.com or 413-930-4429. Twitter: @MaryEByrne