The Montgomery County Legislature went into an hour-long executive session at a special meeting Tuesday to try to figure out how to fix a mistake made at a recent auction of tax-delinquent properties, but no solution was proposed.
Three properties in the Town of Glen, including the site of the former Poplars resort in Fultonville, were intended to be sold as one but were instead sold separately. Officials from Buanno Holdings LLC in Fultonville were the successful bidders for one of the parcels, and they also thought they had purchased two adjacent, smaller parcels when the original successful bidder failed to produce the required down payment.
District 2 Legislator Thomas Quackenbush, chairman of the Legislature, said at last week’s regular session that he would convene a special meeting, if necessary, to resolve the issue.
“I called for the executive session to talk about properties owned by Montgomery County,” Quackenbush said after the meeting. “It’s obviously about the parcels involved in the auction.”
Quackenbush said the situation was “still somewhat up in the air. We’re trying to determine the direction we should go. Do we make it one piece of property, do we go for RFPs [requests for proposals], do we auction them again? There are a number of things we could do.”
He said any public discussion of what was said in executive session could jeopardize chances of coming up with a solution.
Legislators said last week they did not want to reject the bid from Buanno Holdings LLC, but were unsure whether anyone would buy the two smaller parcels if they were sold separately; they are too small to be developed under the town of Glen’s minimum lot size requirement.
“It’s riverfront property in a developable area,” Quackenbush said. “The Poplars was a hopping place.”
