“DON’T SET YOUR SIGHTS TOO HIGH!”

by: Dan Barton, Publisher of THE New -Harmony Gazette

January 2019

President of the New Harmony Town Council, Alvin Blaylock, made that headline statement on December 18, 2018, just in time to win the “ The New Harmony Gazette’s Biggest Understatement of the Year Award!” He was speaking of his noticeable mishandling of the sale of the former New Harmony School. In this particular case refers to the constant and steady shrinking of the opportunity of our town ever seeing a sensible profit from its sale.

Back in 2012, former Council President David Campbell stated in an interview with the Evansville Courier and Press that the New Harmony School had been appraised for a value of $7 million dollars. In 2015, former Councilwoman Karen Walker announced at a Town Council meeting that the state of the art hardball-field, included in the school property, was worth a million dollars. A few months ago in 2018 Councilman Blaylock had an appraisal done on the school property and the results came back as a dismal $360 thousand dollars. Even Blaylock himself admitted that he was disappointed.

Now, after following our past New Harmony Town Council’s tradition of only advertising the property to a limited population, in this case in two Posey County newspapers and for a bid of not lower than $360 thousand dollars, he must be even more disappointed. He only received two bids on the former New Harmony School property. One bid was for $80 thousand dollars from Lupfer Equipment, LLC. Blaylock didn’t bother to announce that name at the Council meeting. It was learned later that Lupfer Equipment is listed as being owned by Joseph Lupfer of Cynthiana. It’s identified as asphalt paving company.

The second bid for the New Harmony School property was only for $10 thousand dollars. But this bid was restricted to just the 56,000 square foot building and five acres. Blaylock didn’t identify which five acres. The name of the $10 thousand dollar bidder was also kept quiet by Blaylock in the meeting. He did mention that there was a “gentleman” in the audience who was one of the two bidders. He never mentioned his name or what organization he represented or even what property he had bid on. Thanks to work done by David Campbell in his letter to the editor of the Posey County News, the bidder has been identified as the pastor of the New Life Apostolic Church, Richard Giles, of Carmi, Illinois. The pastor was not invited by Blaylock to speak at the Town Council meeting and explain what his plans are for the property if he should own it. At the end of the meeting, Roger Wade asked Pastor Giles to stay behind so that they could speak to him privately.

In six years we have gone from $125 per square foot to $6.42 per square foot, to a potential of $1.43 per square foot, and now an impossible impossibility of 18 cents per square foot. And Mr. Blaylock is warning us not to get our sights set too high. I don’t think he’s telling us anything we haven’t already figured out. Blaylock, it seems, has next to no ability, if any, in the field of real estate.

Over the past several months many of us have tried to urge him to be more aggressive in marketing this property. Last Spring both myself and New Harmony town resident Tom Stahl tried to get him moving on the sale of the former New Harmony School. The Working Men’s Institute had given up on it’s the erstwhile project in December 2017. For weeks following WMI’s failure, in 2018, Mr. Blaylock and his Council sat and did nothing. Finally, here we are almost a year later and instead of listing it with a professional real estate broker or agent, after finishing the state-mandated 60-day bid listing has been completed, he has decided to once again go through another, this time unnecessary, bidding process, lowering the

minimum bid requirements substantially. It appears that he’s drastically lowering his own “sights.” Not ours!

Councilman David Flanders asked the Town Attorney, Erin Bauer, during the December Council meeting if the Council was not now at the place where the property could be listed with a broker instead of going through another bidding process. Lawyer Bauer’s answer was, “You could do that (list with a broker) right now if the Town Council decided to reject all of the bids and make a motion to hire a broker or an auctioneer. That would be an option.” But no one on the Council even attempted to make any such motion. Flanders did pursue the topic in a discussion format. He stated to Blaylock that in the prior 60 day listing of the property that the Town Council did the minimal in advertising. He stated, “We didn’t do a very robust advertising campaign to solicit bids.” He went on to say, “At this point, I would suggest entertaining the services of a broker.” But he did not try to make a formal motion in that regard during the meeting. Blaylock countered him by saying that, “We have a motion on the floor and you’re getting into a different subject!” I’d like to point out that the motion language was changed several times during the meeting from what it said when it was first introduced without any objections from Mr. Blaylock.

The School property has been mishandled and mismanaged by Blaylock’s Council and the former Council since the school closed. Two consecutive Councils have allowed the HVAC system to turn off and be left off for three summers in a row, causing three hundred thousand dollars worth of damage. In a previous Council meeting late last Spring I advised Councilman Blaylock that the HVAC could be repaired, according to estimates compiled by WMI president Fred Fayser, for as little as $9,500 dollars. His answer was that the company doing the repairs could not give him a five-year guarantee. Anybody out there gets a five-year guarantee when they come out and repair your central air? So to save$9,500 dollars, he allowed the Air to stay off and certainly must have caused additional mold problems to recur. He had $20 thousand dollars sitting in the school fund account at the time. Over the past year, he has depleted that fund account by almost $10 thousand dollars. In addition to all this, the Town of New Harmony had previously spent $40 thousand dollars to stop the mold growth from the original damage done by the negligence of the previous Council. That didn’t faze Blaylock, he simply ignored the problem.

Now he sounds like he is seriously considering taking one of the two most recent bids for the school if he doesn’t get a better one in his next futile attempt, saying, “I want to caution everyone here. Don’t get your sights too high. You know for three years we tried to give the school away for a dollar!” Oh come on now Blaylock, you’re talking about The Working Men’s Institute project. The difference that Blaylock’s leaving out, as usual, is that WMI is a quasi-governmental entity that has existed in New Harmony since 1838. Nathan Maudlin, vice president of the WMI, had given Blaylock the go-ahead to market the school from the time that Blaylock took office in January 2016. Blaylock never took one step forward on that advice. WMI also said that if they could not successfully complete their project or failed during any phase of it, after they took the title, that they would only ask for the return of whatever money they had put into the property. A fair deal all around! There is no comparison to what is now taking place, and Blaylock knows it.

Who knows, maybe Blaylock will get lucky and he will manage to take the lowest of the two bids somehow. That does seem to be his goal. I’m not sure what a church from Carmi, with a very large and modern facility of their own, would have in mind for a property like the former New Harmony School, but I have a feeling we may be finding out. I doubt that they need another church. Maybe some kind of Country Club and golf course, I was thinking. That would work for Blaylock. But I doubt it’s that. Carmi already has the Carmi Country Club, so that idea wouldn’t make any sense. Would it?

“ A Man’s Character is His Fate!”____Heraclites

FOOTNOTE: This article was posted by the City-County Observer without bias, opinion, or editing.