Mayor may sell strip beside Agawam Town Hall to corner developer

March 30, 2022 | Michael Ballway
mballway@thereminder.com

A row of trees marks the line between Agawam Town Hall and the vacant lots owned by Colvest Group at Main and Suffield streets. Mayor William Sapelli is proposing selling a half-acre strip of Town Hall land along those trees to the developer.
Reminder Publishing photo by Michael Ballway

AGAWAM – Town Hall may lose a row of parking spaces, but the town will benefit from long-awaited redevelopment of the former Getty and Agawam Motel properties at Main and Suffield streets, Mayor William Sapelli said last week.

The City Council voted 7-0, with four members absent, to allow Sapelli to sell about half an acre of land on the Town Hall property to Colvest Group of Springfield, which owns the adjacent vacant lots where the gas station and motel once stood.

“He’s looking at three parcels there, bringing in three different businesses,” Sapelli told councilors on March 21. “One he’s looking at is a potential Starbucks-type. He also mentioned a professional business in the front end, and possibly a fast-food [restaurant].”

Sapelli said adding the strip of land from the Town Hall property would give Colvest enough room for the parking and drive-through lanes its prospective tenants need. Town Solicitor Stephen Buoniconti said the Town Hall land is not currently zoned for commercial use, so the half-acre strip would need to be rezoned for Colvest to use it.

Town assessors have valued the land Sapelli wants to sell at about $23,000, the mayor said. That figure is small enough that the property can be sold without needing a competitive bid process. He said after the meeting that the purpose of the sale is not to raise money for the town, but to accommodate the best – and highest-taxable – use for the corner lot, and to move one step closer to creating a fully town-owned campus between Town Hall and Roberta Doering School.

Colvest owns a former house lot at 50 Main St., adjacent to the school and two doors down from Town Hall. Sapelli said his negotiations with Colvest have involved two related deals where the town would sell the strip of Town Hall property, but would acquire the former house lot, which assessors list as 1.3 acres. The house lot connects at its rear with the parking lots for both the school and Town Hall.

“We expect to get more in return than we’re giving up,” Buoniconti told councilors. “We drove the toughest bargain we possibly could to make sure what we’re giving up is the minimum to give up, and not affect Town Hall options or Doering School options.”

Councilor Robert Rossi noted that several years ago, the house at 50 Main St. was sold at auction, and the council chose not to bid on it. The council at the time discussed how that parcel would give the town flexibility to re-engineer the drop-off and pick-up traffic pattern around the middle school. On March 21, Rossi called the acquisition of 50 Main St. “a win for the town,” and said it would give “endless opportunities and options for the future” of the school.

Another house lot between Town Hall and Doering, a half-acre parcel at 46 Main St., is not owned by Colvest and would remain in private hands.

The council’s vote on March 21 declares the strip to the west of Town Hall as “surplus property,” which allows but does not require the mayor to sell it.

Buoniconti said if the mayor can’t finalize the deal he wants with Colvest, he is prepared to walk away.

“We are not going to be shortchanged,” Buoniconti said. “We think that this is a great deal for the town, [if] it works out the way we want. If it’s not what we intend, if something falls apart, we won’t do that.”

The Colvest property at Main and Suffield streets, a combined 1.7 acres, has long been an eyesore in a prominent location – one of the first things drivers see in Agawam after crossing the Morgan-Sullivan Bridge from Memorial Avenue in West Springfield. Before it was razed in 2016, the motel had been declared a blighted property, with city officials citing health code violations and higher than average police calls. The Getty gas station at the corner had been abandoned years before that. During reconstruction work on the Morgan-Sullivan Bridge from 2018 to 2021, crews used the vacant lots as a staging area for equipment and vehicles.

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