Cheshire Looks to AG's Office for Blighted Property Help

CHESHIRE, Mass. — The Select Board heard a presentation last week from the state's Neighborhood Renewal Division program that could help rehabilitate two properties condemned by the Board of Health.

Janice Fahey, assistant attorney general for the division, explained program and what it means at last Tuesday's meeting.

"Our mission is to work with cities and towns in order to ensure safer neighborhoods by working with cities and towns to rehabilitate and bring them into compliance with the state sanitary code and to create safe, habitable homes," Fahey said.

At the March 17 meeting, Town Administrator Jennifer Morse said 200 School St. and 73 West Mountain Road were condemned by the Board of Health and a request was sent to the Attorney General's Office Division of Receivership Programs.

The program, active since 1995, has expanded to work with 169 municipal partners and 205 active properties, with 54 active cases in litigation. It has brought $714,000 into city and town coffers through tax and fee recoveries. The process involves identifying properties, conducting inspections, issuing orders to correct violations, and potentially appointing receivers if owners are uncooperative. 

Fahey said the division works with the local board of health to do a title search on who owns the property.

"If the owner is cooperative, then we will just work with them to bring the property up to the sanitary code. And it's uncooperative, we may file a receivership petition. So when first of all, who is a receiver? A receiver can be anyone who has knowledge and capacity to work with a property and bring it up to the sanitary code," she said.

Fahey said the cost to fix property cannot exceed the cost of its  market value as the receiver has to get paid.

"This isn't something that is going to be making the receiver rich. It's kind of going to be something that just basically cleans up the property, gets it rehabbed, gets it back on the tax rolls, and hopefully a family moves in, and there has to be the receiver, has to have funding. Sometimes there are grants that we'll talk about later as well, but in the end there, they have to have some type of ability to get loans or. Fund a project and get insurance as well."

After being appointed by the court, the receiver will do an inspection and create a budget and scope of work. Once property is brought up to standard sanitary code, they ask the court for authority to foreclose on the property to recover what they spent. In some cases, instead of foreclosure, there may be a fair market value sale approved by the court.

Once the property is sold either through auction or sale the town will get paid municipal fees and the unpaid property taxes, then the receiver will get paid.

Fahey said it takes a lot of work and showed pictures of some properties rehabilitated throught the program that she described as a team effort.

"That involves everyone. It involves the city and town. It involves the receiver, certainly, and it takes a lot of people to put this together, and the time range is pretty significant, from a couple of months to a couple of years," she said. 

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