One Community Update
December 4, 2024

Source: Brattleboro Reformer

A vacant building ordinance will be revised again before adoption.

Susan Bellville, local property manager, told the Select Board the ordinance would be punitive in situations where homes are difficult to sell due to various legal issues or vacant after an owner dies and the heirs are figuring out what to do with the estate. She suggested having an exemption to allow owners to notify the town and put forward a plan to address such scenarios.

“You don’t want to see properties improperly punished,” former board member Dick DeGray said in support of holding off on adoption.

He wondered if Lester Dunklee’s former machine shop might be subject to the ordinance since Dunklee retired.

Board members decided to wait a month to revisit the ordinance with edits from town staff rather than make an amendment during the second reading Tuesday when the ordinance could have been finalized.

“I would personally like to see this given some more time and thought,” Board Chairman Daniel Quipp said. “I know a great deal of time and thought has already gone into it.”

A first reading of the ordinance was held in May. Last month, the former Sportmen’s Lounge on Canal Street was destroyed in a fire and the former Friendly’s on Putney Road was demolished. Both buildings would have been classified as vacant under the ordinance.

Some changes to the proposed ordinance were made based on input from the board and public at the first reading.

“So first we did some work on what a definition of a vacant building actually is,” said Steve Hayes, town planning technician. “There had been some feedback at the previous meeting with concern about what constitutes vacancy and whether there might be some potential loopholes where very sporadic occupancy could be used to avoid having to actually register as a vacant building.”

Hayes said the ordinance now defines a “vacant building” as any structure not continuously occupied by an “authorized person” for a permitted land use — except for specific exemptions such as a summer home, warehouse or utility facility — for a period of 180 days or more. The definition of “authorized person” is anyone with “the legal right to occupy the premises for a period of at least 30 days, such as a property owner, a legal tenant or a designated agent and/or property manager for the owner,” and “authorized use” would include “a duly permitted land use approved by all applicable agencies, state, local or federal.”

Town staff are suggesting a flat registration fee of $1,000 for the year with no distinction between residential and commercial use, size or number of units. That fee would double for each year a property needs to be registered until it hits $10,000 then it would increase annually by $5,000.

Hayes said the proposed fees are comparable to Barre City’s, which is $500 every six months, and “a bit higher” than Rutland’s, which is $100 a year.

“We also require that if a owner of a vacant property is not able to actually respond to requests from the town that they be designating someone in the area who can do that within 24 hours,” he said. “And we’ve deliberately set the multiple unit vacancy rate at 75 percent so that very small duplexes, three-unit type residential dwellings, would not be actually applicable to this until they’re completely empty, because we didn’t want to be overly punitive to that sort of small type of housing, and that also on the other side is avoiding being overly punitive to larger residential or commercial type properties where there are a low number of vacancies that are just the result of normal economics.”

Board member Richard Davis called the fees “too low,” given that the buildings could present “a life or death issue.”

“It’s a miracle that nobody died in the Sportsmen’s fire,” he said. “I don’t know if McNeill’s were to qualify as an abandoned building but we had a death there.”

Ray McNeill, owner of McNeill’s Brewery, died in the 2022 fire. He had been living in an apartment in the building, which the town had deemed structurally unsound.

Civil penalties of $800 per day can be incurred for violations including not paying the fees and not keeping the structure secure. However, the matter would then be handled by civil court. And if tickets continued to accumulate without any action, the town could ask the court for permission to demolish the building.

Planning Director Sue Fillion estimated the town has about five buildings that would qualify as vacant under the ordinance. She said she wasn’t involved in the enforcement on the Sportsmen’s Lounge, however, “we were putting a lot of pressure on the property owner to board it up, keep it boarded up, all those things.”

With the former Friendly’s, Fillion said, “We had no teeth. All we could do is say, ‘Hey, when are you going to tear that down?'”

Fillion said the former Home Depot wouldn’t qualify since the plaza has 10 units and only about four are vacant.