By Angela H. Hill
At its November 16 meeting, the Stuart Town Council and Mayor Ray Weiland approved pursuing a USDA-Rural Development Community Facilities loan to purchase the former Food Lion building on Wood Brothers Drive as a new home for the Stuart Volunteer Fire Department.
The property is assessed at $2.46 million, but building owner HopCo LLC offered it to the town for $1.2 million. The building comes with 15.12 acres. Town officials said parts of the building not used by the fire department could become office and meeting space.
To accommodate the fire department, the 28,800-square-foot building will need approximately $800,000 in renovations, including installing garage doors and replacing parts of the existing 4-inch concrete with 6-inch concrete, which is necessary to support fire trucks and equipment.
Town officials looked at least 10 options for relocation, Stuart Town Attorney Chris Corbett said at the council meeting. Of those, the best option was to build a new station on Commerce Street, but that would have run approximately $3 million, he said.
Town Council received no public comments on financing the building purchase. After Corbett’s presentation, the board’s vote ended in a tie with council members Terry Dalton and Rebecca Adcock voting for the financing, and Leon Puckett and Dean Goad voting against it. John “Mac” Deekens was absent.
Weiland cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the financing, effectively passing the measure.
Corbett said the town should take full advantage of the USDA’s all-time low loan rate of 2.24 percent, as it may be “the lowest rate we see for the rest of our lives.”
Goad said he’s in favor of purchasing the building, but he’d rather it be paid for outright versus the town incurring additional debt.
Weiland said he too would like to pay for the building outright, but that it’s not possible because the town must maintain a certain amount of money in its general fund. To purchase the building, the town would have to pull money away from the upcoming sewage treatment plant upgrade.
“Since I’ve been mayor, since Day 1, I’ve been wanting to get a new home for the fire department,” Weiland said. “This is one of those deals we couldn’t pass up; that we shouldn’t pass up.
“It hits at a hard time with the sewer project, but we’re situated to where we can do this, and we can do it reasonably.”
Weiland continued that he does, however, hope to pay the loan off in as few as five years. The loan is a 40-year loan but there is no prepayment penalty. Corbett said the closing date for the loan is set at December 1.
Corbett said that fire and town officials recently toured the Altavista Fire Department’s similar conversion of a grocery store and liked what they saw. “It became an attractive option pretty quickly,” he said.
Also, Corbett said town officials looked at the former Alexander’s grocery store building in Uptown Stuart but found that it would not work as well as the former Food Lion. The Alexander’s building is older, and presents ingress and egress challenges, town officials noted.
In other Town Council news, the council discussed timing on parts of the sewer-system upgrade project, and said the town may solicit bids for the work as early as this spring.
Town Manager Terry Tilley said he also met with Adcock about the restored caboose scheduled to be placed in Downtown Stuart near the first section of the Mayo River Rail Trail in honor of the “Dick & Willie” (Danville & Western) Railroad that once stopped here.
Depending on the preparation work, the caboose site could be ready in as few as three weeks. Jerry Wilson, who has retired from painting cars, will sandblast and paint the caboose.
In wrapping up the meeting, town officials discussed the issue of overdue water bills that remain unpaid by businesses and residents. A significant amount of the $8,000 in overdue bills has been collected, and efforts will continue to recover the rest.
Weiland said that the town may be “tightening things up a bit” on collecting those overdue bills, explaining that it’s unfair to those businesses and residents who do pay their bills on time.
