Frank Speziale photo

NORWICH – At a special City of Norwich Common Council meeting last Tuesday, October 3, the council sold a city-owned property at 61-63 South Broad Street by awarding it to a lower bid, with the mayor casting the deciding vote.

The council was originally split in a vote of 3 to 3 on who to sell the property to, until Norwich Mayor Christine Carnrike broke the stalemate, and voted to defeat a motion to sell the property to the highest bidder for $75,000, and instead she supported a move to sell it to another bidder for $25,000 less.

After receiving two serious Requests for Proposals for the property – one from Eric Larsen (Coronado Enterprises) for $75,000, and one from PharmAssist (School House, LLC) for $50,000 – the council would ultimately move to designate PharmAssist as the designated preferred purchaser after weighing the proposed uses of the building, according Carnrike.

"What the city has done for a number of years is we do a Request for Proposal instead of bidders," said Carnrike. "In years past when we had unredeemed properties and we used a bidding process and gone with the highest bidder––it didn't really work out for the best. Some of them, we ended up taking them over again in four, five years because the bidder didn't fulfill the obligations."

The city acquired the property through property tax foreclosure, and Carnrike said the council's preferred use of the building is residential as opposed to commercial.