ATHOL – Questions on ownership of a small parcel in the middle of the municipal parking lot off Exchange Street may hold up a proposed housing development.

During a virtual meeting of the Economic Development and Industrial Corporation last Wednesday, Dec. 11, Chair Keith McGuirk explained that the town owns nearly all of the property that makes up the parking lot, with the exception of two small parcels owned by M. Jemms Athol III, LLC of Burlington. Easements over all of the parcels will need to be secured by developer Bill Krikorian in order to allow tenants in and out of the facility.

Krikorian is proposing a 43-unit affordable housing project on the site of the long-closed municipal parking garage.

“There appears to be a significant problem with one of these parcels. That’s parcel #233, right in the center of the parking lot,” McGuirk said, referring to an assessor’s map. “That’s a town-owned parcel, except we can’t prove where it came from. There’s an issue with this property.

“In 1960,” McGuirk continued, “this was owned by William Lord. He owned that and he granted the town an easement for utilities across it, but not the whole parcel. There’s no record that we can find of the town ever acquiring legal ownership of that property.”

EDIC member Rebecca Bialecki asked if ownership may have been transferred to the town when Lord died.

“No,” McGuirk replied. “Hannigan Engineers told me they searched diligently, and they could find no record of the town ever owning that property. I spent 10 hours researching this and I have also found no evidence of the town ever legally acquiring that property.”

Hannigan is the engineering firm working with Krikorian on the development.

Bialecki then asked if it would be possible to have Town Counsel John Barrett “provide a letter saying that the easements over time just became part of the town property.”

McGuirk again answered in the negative.

“It was just a utilities easement,” he said. “They didn’t include the whole parcel. It included a little strip of land over it for laying water pipe, but it doesn’t include the whole parcel. Somehow or another that parcel is now listed as town property, but we can’t prove where or when. And the town can’t grant easements across it if we don’t actually own it.”

McGuirk said he has asked Barrett to get an estimate of the cost of hiring a professional title searcher to do a thorough search. Barrett, McGuirk added, agreed that hiring a professional to search the titles would be the best way to proceed.

“I searched back into the 1800s and I became dead in the water at 1960, and I couldn’t find anything beyond that,” said McGuirk. “If this is not really a legal town property, we need to make it so through some kind of taking for the purpose of municipal parking.”

He agreed with Bialecki that the town may have to resort to invoking eminent domain to secure the property.

Earlier in the meeting, McGuirk explained that Krikorian was willing to close on the parking garage property “very quickly, even before the rights of way and the easements are actually signed and everything, provided he can get a letter from the town and the EDIC stating that he will…be getting these rights of way ASAP.”

McGuirk said the Fitchburg developer needs assurances in writing in order to put together the financing to move ahead with the project. Krikorian first approached the EDIC with plans for the proposed development in July of 2022. At the time the estimated cost of the project ranged from $12 million to $15 million.

Greg Vine can be reached at gvineadn@gmail.com.