Town considers more work on Opera House

NORWAY — Town Manager David Holt told town officials that the Norway Opera House could be a component of a massive, half-million dollar Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) application designed to spruce up Main Street.

Now that stabilization efforts on the historic building are drawing to a close, the board will attempt to identify an owner. The structure is still in litigation with former owner BiTim Enterprises, Inc., a company owned by New Hampshire developer Barry Mazzaglia.

"I think what the board needs to do fairly soon is talk about what it wants to do with the Opera House," said Holt.

The decision needs to be made, said Holt, because some owners might be more compatible with a CDBG downtown grant than others. The board decided to meet with knowledgeable parties in February to make a decision.

"If [the board] were to do this, you'd have to be deciding who the owner's going to be. And we might want to explore this more, as to which owner would work the best for the application."

Potential owners include an as-yet-unknown private owner, the Opera House Corporation, and an extended ownership period by the town.

The Opera House Corporation is a nonprofit corporation formed for the preservation and betterment of the Opera House, and has been active in saving the building.

The town's ownership could make a CDBG grant more likely to be funded.

Holt said that the town's ownership might be desirable "if it helped this application for the town to own it a little longer, so they could fix up the storefronts so they could be rented before you dispose of the building to either the private owner or the Opera House Corporation."

While the Opera House Corporation may seem like the natural ownership party, Holt said that the group is not yet convinced that it should assume that role.

"I think what they feel they'd like to do is to do a study ...  to look at the building in its current shape and identify what it would need," said Holt. "While that's maybe not the enthusiasm that some folks would like them to have about it, I think from their point of view, it makes some sense. Let's know what we're getting into before we dive in."

The building is currently stable, after hundreds of thousand of dollars of work was done by Chabot Construction this year. A portion of a CDBG grant could be used to take steps towards providing utilities to the building's storefronts, which would make it a more attractive proposition for an investor.

"We do have some good ingredients for what might be a good application," said Holt. "With all of the fund raising that's going on, and different projects, those are the kinds of things that lead to what are sometimes successful applications."

The advantage of a downtown grant, said Holt, is that more money can be applied for.

"The limit on the public facilities category that we used for the Opera House is $150,000," said Holt. "The limit for a downtown application would be $600,000."

Other projects that might justify a downtown application include the Gingerbread house and the Lajos Matolcsy Arts Center, both located on Main Street.

On March 31, the Oxford County Superior Court will decide how much the town will pay Mazzaglia for the Opera House, which was taken by eminent domain. Mazzaglia is seeking $328,000 for the building, while the town is offering $185,000. Each party has appraisals to document its estimate.