With any jigsaw puzzle, it’s a matter of finding how the pieces fit together. For Whately, affording its new town office building has been a puzzle with a missing piece: a paying tenant to help cover the mortgage.
As the year comes to an end, the town may have found its missing piece.
The story began about two years ago when Deerfield, Sunderland and Whately created the South County regional ambulance service, with the idea of leasing garage and office space in the former regional library building at 4 Sandy Lane. Whately bought the building for town offices, even though it was larger than needed, assuming it could get a paying tenant to cover the costs.
“Initially, we bought the building because we were led to believe it’d be the new home for” South County EMS, Select Board Chairman Paul Newlin said last week. “That was one of the big motivators. SCEMS was the perfect fit as far as we were concerned, and as far as SCEMS was concerned.”
Until the library deal could be consummated, South County ambulances have been housed in South Deerfield.
Moving the ambulances to Whately, however, did not sit well with a number of Deerfield residents, who have fought the Whately plan and most recently persuaded Deerfield Academy to build and give to the town a 3,600-square-foot, wood-frame EMS building on Deerfield-owned land — quite close to the current South Deerfield fire station.
That plan would likely be a more economical way to house South County EMS, but it also left Whately in the lurch. The town had counted on the EMS rent to help pay back its $810,000 USDA Rural Housing Service Loan.
Finding an alternate tenant would be difficult as the loan stipulated the building could not be rented to a private concern. And except for Union 38 school administrators, who eventually moved to Frontier Regional School, there has been little interest from non-profits.
Then, another puzzle piece came on the table. The town sold permanent access to land surrounding a cell tower on Christian Lane in June to American Tower Corp., which had been leasing the property. The sale price to the Wendell-based company was roughly $1.2 million.
Town officials used the money to pay off the federal loan, which opens the building to potential commercial tenants, and relieves the immediate need for cash to cover loan payments.
All this doesn’t prevent South County EMS from eventually moving in.
Newlin points out having the ambulance service headquartered in Deerfield makes sense if “it’s a building that works for everyone, (Deerfield) charges a reasonable rate, and guarantees a good response time.”
But whether or not South County EMS eventually moves to Whately, the town ends the year with a new way to solve its puzzle.