BRUNSWICK

The Brunswick Town Council postponed a vote of approval Monday night for a plan outlining how 702 former Navy housing units in Brunswick and Topsham would be used.

Currently, private developer George Schott’s Affordable Midcoast Housing (AMH) owns the housing, while the land beneath the houses is owned by the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority (MRRA), which acquired the land from the Navy through a conveyance associated with Brunswick Naval Air Station closure.

At its annual meeting last Thursday, MRRA’s board voted to sell the land to Schott for $3.35 million, with the condition that elected officials in both Brunswick and Topsham approve of the plan.

“We didn’t want to go willy-nilly down the road without checking in with you folks,” MRRA executive director Steve Levesque told the council Monday.

Brunswick’s council voted unanimously Monday to table a vote until its next meeting.

Last week, Topsham’s Board of Selectmen also delayed voting on whether to support the housing disposition plan, seeking more time for consideration.

Until both towns cast votes of support for the plan, Schott said, he will only be able to rent the homes.

Monday night, Brunswick councilors expressed reservations about granting MRRA’s requested “endorsement” of the plan, but rather voted unanimously to draft a statement of support for the overall goals of the housing plan to be considered at a Dec. 5 council meeting.

District 3 Councilor Suzan Wilson said during discussion Monday that the idea of “endorsement” was too strong for a process in which she said neither town was directly involved.

“( The towns) are being asked to endorse something that they had little or no input in creating,” Wilson said.

Rather than endorse the full plan, Wilson suggested that the council express support for the goals of the housing plan, which Schott’s representative Scott Howard identified in three parts:

— Increased home ownership

— Increased affordable housing

— Minimized negative impacts on real estate market stability

Howard said he and Schott were “disappointed to not be able to move forward” with the land sale Monday, after more than an hour of discussion about the deal.

District 2 Councilor Ben Tucker urged townspeople to digest the infor- mation presented in the plan Monday.

“ This is a moment in Brunswick’s history where we’re going to see a massive change in ownership,” Tucker said. “The town is going to be attracting new residents, and we as a town need to think about what our goals are.”

Inventory

Levesque said Monday that MRRA decided to seek approval from both towns before completing the sale because the terms differed from those that MRRA drafted in 2009.

Namely, Schott’s plan does not call for housing units at the Topsham Annex or Mc- Keen Street neighborhoods to be demolished — a strategy Levesque said would have reduced the number of houses that would ultimately enter the local real estate market.

District 4 Councilor John Perreault said that he is not worried about that change, but the number of houses to be enter the market remains a concern.

According to an Oct. 4 draft of Schott’s housing plan, the earliest sales would come in the McKeen Street neighborhood, where phases of sales would place around 40 houses on the market at a time over a projected period of five to six years.

That plan worried Perreault.

“I think that’s a lot for one year,” Perreault said. “I have had Realtors tell me that this is going to hurt their revenues at that end of the market.”

However, Schott said Monday that he would not at first be able to place more than the 19 homes along McKeen Street on the market because of a need to repair roads and underground utilities in the interior of the neighborhood first.

In line with the Oct. 4 draft of the plan, Schott said Monday that he would look for the town to take over the roads before selling the properties inside that neighborhood.

Homes throughout, Howard said, would sell for an estimated $110,000 to $145,000.

Howard also said that fewer houses would be on the market overall since the draft of MRRA’s 2009 plan because of a residential Navy program contracted with AMH to rent 110 units to house Navy Sup- Ship construction supervisors overseeing projects at Bath Iron Works.

Schott said that the lease for those tenants will expire in February 2012 and delays would likely hold the next group of ship supervisors over until June, but Schott said he is hopeful about continuing that contract.

“ The thought is that the contract will go forward and be continued,” Schott said.

Overall, Howard said that a survey of AMH’s tenants found that only 12 percent relocated from elsewhere in Brunswick — a sign, he said, that putting more of the homes on the market would be more likely to attract new people into Brunswick rather than simply shuffling people out of other Brunswick homes.

Approval

Sale of the land from MRRA to Schott will now await a second hearing before the Topsham Board of Selectmen on Dec. 1 and the Brunswick Town Council on Dec. 5.