LEWISTON — With a two-year effort nearing completion to untangle the Franklin Property Trust from a 51-acre patchwork of privately owned structures around downtown, councilors Tuesday reviewed their next steps.
The only thing left for the city to do is to take ownership of two lots and clean up the way some easements run downtown, according to Planning Director Gil Arsenault. The rest is up to Franklin Property Trust and its current tenants.
“It’s my understanding that Franklin will be reaching out to the residents,” Arsenault said. “That’s what we’ve been encouraging, but we have no control over the prices. It’s out of our hands.”
He added, “The financing has nothing to do with the city. Our only goal all along has been to create a situation where people can get an opportunity to buy the lands under and around their homes.”
It was the first time the new council had discussed the negotiations with the trust.
The effort involves as many as 98 properties on 51 acres owned by the trust. Many contain buildings owned by working-class residents who pay month-to-month rents to the trust for the use of the land where the building sits. The practice began as a benefit for mill employees, allowing them to build affordable, modest homes for less money. Many have been passed down from generation to generation.
“You have had a similar situation with mobile homes, where the park owner owns the land and the individual owns the home on it,” City Administrator Ed Barrett said. “There is one big difference: These are actual structures and are not movable.”
The lots are typically small, predating Lewiston’s zoning codes for minimum lot sizes. Local banks and credit unions regularly loaned money for home improvements and mortgages on the homes until 2008’s recession. Without those loans, today’s homeowners had a difficult time obtaining major repairs.
Barrett said the city has been aware of the problem since 2008, but began to make headway in 2014 with efforts to clean up dilapidated and failing buildings around the downtown. Some abandoned structures turned out to be built on land owned by the Franklin Trust, so it and the city began negotiating a way to share the costs of demolishing those buildings.
According to the deal, the city and Franklin have split the $150,000 demolition costs for 16 structures, Economic Development Director Lincoln Jeffers said.
Many of the remaining lots are much smaller then the city’s zoning codes allow, however, so city councilors agreed last summer to let the trust combine those properties and to offer to sell them to the current residents.
According to City Planner Dave Hediger, the city would also assume ownership of two lots currently used as a park on Lincoln Street between the two ends of Lincoln Circle.
The city would also accept a 20-foot-wide easement along the Androscoggin River with an eye toward a future recreation path, and other easements that match existing roads.
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