D.C. firm still wants CES

A Washington, D.C.-based company is asking Madison County officials to once again consider its offer to purchase the former Criglersville Elementary School buildings and their surrounding property.

Last week, The Craftsmen Group Inc. – a historic restoration and preservation company – re-sent its offer to buy the 1940s-era structure for $167,000, according to the company’s president, Christian Kelleher.

Kelleher – who first learned of the site’s availability for sale two years ago from some personal friends who live in Madison County – initially made the offer to the board of supervisors in August 2007, he said.

The offer followed the supervisors’ consideration – and eventual denial – of a proposal to sell the property along Old Blue Ridge Turnpike (Route 670) to a neighboring church for $100,000.

The company – which chose the $167,000-figure “out of the air,” but mostly because it was greater than the church’s offer and it’s all it can afford – had proposed to use the site for its restoration work and for storage of antiques, according to Kelleher. The offer states that the noise from its business use of the building would be “less than typical farm machinery.”

“I would think of it as a retreat in some sense for special projects and storage,” Keller said of the company’s plans for the building, which was last regularly used as a school in 2003, although it was used regularly as a community center up until 2006.

“Little has changed from the initial offer,” according to Kelleher, although one thing he did revise was related to the public use of the property’s athletic field. Initially the company had offered use of the field to the county based on a lease agreement that would be renewed every 10 years, which Kelleher decided to change to a two-year renewal basis.

The company says it’s also open to allow public use of the property as a polling place for the Criglersville voting precinct. However, Kelleher said he was under the impression voters would use the main school building, rather than one of the two white, wood-frame cottages on the site, which the company has proposed to use as an office and a guest house for its employees.

Following the company’s initial offer to the county in August 2007, the supervisors pursued a survey of the property. The survey was, at least partially, to gather more information about whether Kelleher’s plans for the property would conflict with the county’s zoning regulations, he said.

But when the company’s president still hadn’t heard back from county officials about the survey and he heard from a friend that the supervisors had listed the property for sale on a real estate Web site, he was confused about where officials stood on his offer, he said.

Kelleher says that last fall he contacted Montague, Miller and Company Broker Bud Kreh, who voluntarily listed the property for the county, and was told that the supervisors wanted a minimum of $350,000 for the property.

The site was listed on two separate Multiple Listing Service real estate databases for its most recent assessed value of $854,000 from October 2008 to February 2009, Kreh previously told The Eagle.

During the supervisors most recent conversations of the former school site, County Administrator Lisa Robertson said that during the almost four months the property was on the market, county officials didn’t “have a single serious inquiry” and that if taxpayers insisted the county pursue a sale of the property at the full amount of its assessed value, the county may have to hold onto the property for “quite awhile” until the real estate market recovers.

“I’m not surprised there were no other offers,” Kelleher said of the main, two-story brick 1940s-era building, which officials have previously said would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring up to modern-day building codes.

“We’re still interested,” he said. “I’m sorry the county isn’t more charmed by the offer.”