Detailed update March 5 2013
The disposition of the Old Town Hall is a bit confusing at
the moment but I can give you the big picture. Most of what has been said in previous posts is correct, except dates, which are rather confusing. FYI the Town is represented by Town Counsel George Hall Jr.
Mr. Hanney (aka Entertainment Management Corp and Ipswich RE
Holdings LLC) was served a summons on 2/14/13 to respond to a Complaint that was filed by the Town of Ipswich at the Newburyport Superior Court on 2/5/13. The Complaint is known as Civil Action docket 2013-189 (officially ESCV2013 - 189 - B). It requires Mr. Hanney to respond to the Complaint within 20 days of service not counting the day of service. The BOS had different dates so I have to confirm which is correct.
The Complaint addresses the terms and conditions in the Deed (to use the building for
entertainment and retail purposes etc) and the preservation restrictions set
up by the Ipswich Historical Commission, also part of the Deed. These
restrictions have to do with what is allowed and not allowed in terms of
changes to be made to the building, as well as requirements for preservation.
You
will find the preservation restrictions on 13 pages of the Deed on the right
hand side column of this BLOG under the section for reference material. (I
apologize in advance for the formatting mess in that document, I cannot get the file to
copy/paste properly… if you want the properly formatted document ask and I will
try to forward it!) In this same list of reference materials you will see Mass General Laws Chapter 184 sections 31 to 33, which govern the preservation restrictions.
The BOS expressed the hope that this approach will ensure the building is properly preserved by Hanney as agreed
upon in the Deed documents and specified restrictions. The BOS hopes that this action will also draw in Mr. Hanney to engage in meaningful interaction
with the Town to resolve all outstanding issues.
Based on what the BOS told me, in earlier POST's By the way, in previous POST's I reported
incorrectly the dates of various legal requirements based on earlier BOS information that was not accurate. Yikes. I am still trying to nail down the correct
dates and facts.
Now that I have seen the Court documents, I can confirm that the Complaint is dated 2/5/13. The summons was served 2/14/13. Also, the Court uses a time-line of legal stages called the Scheduling Order (SO) which ordains the deadlines for various events required to reach resolution. The latest final date for resolution is 11/27/14. That's 1 year and 9 months worst case. Those 21 months aren't going to help the old building very much... this is going to become a big problem, I predict.
The Town Counsel can expedite his stages in the SO that will speed it up, as this SO is a list of stage deadlines, not waiting times; each time either party acts earlier than the deadline, the process jumps ahead and revises the calendar.
At the 3/5/13 BOS Meeting I also asked the BOS in what manner they would monitor legal progress and was told that was done by "haunting" Counsel with regular contact and requests, but Counsel refuses to provide estimates of time lines and contingencies. Not so good. I plan to offer a suggestion for updates that I think will work, more on that later.
You can watch the video of the BOS meeting that led to this
post 3/4/13 at http://ipswichma.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=2&clip_id=355.
Go to about 10 minutes and 15 seconds into the ICAM replay.
No comments:
Post a Comment