A deal’s a deal

Westbrook city councilors and city administrators are right to be holding the two Westbrook businessmen who purchased the city’s old police station to the original terms of the agreement.

Paul Gore and Joe Mazzone bought the building from the city for $450,000 last September. They told the city they planned to move their business, Port City Graphics, there. They told the city they also planned to do improvements to the building and use what remained as a “business incubator” – an appealing offer to a city that has been trying to bring more businesses to its downtown for years.

Now, nearly a year later, none of that has happened.

The deal imploded last year when a for-sale sign went up outside the building as the ink was drying on the contract with the city. Gore and Mazzone offered an explanation that made some sense at the time – they heard someone else was interested in purchasing the building as they were buying it. They therefore figured there might actually be pent-up demand for the building and decided to put it on the market to find out.

Although that probably didn’t sit well with city councilors, any other smart business owner would have done the same thing. If there were companies knocking at their door to offer them twice what they paid for the building, they would have been fools to pass the offers up.

But that doesn’t seem to be what’s happened. Gore and Mazzone left the building on the market for months and finally came back to the city with an offer of $100,000 to get them out of their agreement so that they could sell the building for an undisclosed sum of money to a non-profit organization, the Children’s Theater of Maine.

Under almost any other circumstances, the city would no doubt love to have the Children’s Theater relocate from Portland to Westbrook. The organization would bring culture and opportunity for local children and other organizations that serve them. It would also invest $1 million in the building.

However, the city wouldn’t reap any tax benefit from that investment because the Children’s Theater is a non-profit organization. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with non-profit organizations, that wasn’t the bill of goods Gore and Mazzone sold the city when they purchased the building through a public request for proposals – a process designed to allow the city some say in what happens to the property, rather than simply getting the highest purchase price. Taking advantage of that process to get a lower purchase price and then turning around and selling it to the highest bidder isn’t right.

Gore and Mazzone have said their plans have changed. They say the old police station is too small to relocate their entire business there and they don’t want to operate out of two locations. They also say they’ve got three years left on their lease at the Dana Warp Mill.

While that rationale makes sense, what isn’t clear is why those two facts didn’t stop them from buying the building in the first place.

Guarantee dispatchers jobs

Gorham town councilors are facing a tough decision next week when they will have to decide whether to consolidate their dispatchers and emergency call center with the county.

While the town might lose some of its local service and control through the consolidation, we believe it will ultimately be necessary to save money and comply with a state mandate to reduce the number of emergency call centers in the county and the state.

However, the town should try to negotiate a contract with the county that would guarantee all of the dispatchers losing their jobs in Gorham would get the first shots at the new jobs created if they want them. It’s only fair that those sacrificing their jobs to this consolidation get first consideration for the new jobs created by it.

Brendan Moran, editor