Beacon Firehouse Sale Pending

Mase buyer expected to soon sign contract

The Beacon City Council has approved the sale of the 114-year-old Mase Hook & Ladder fire station, although city officials said the buyer and price won’t be revealed until the contract is finalized. 

The council voted, 6-0, on Monday (May 19), with Jeff Domanski of Ward 2 abstaining. He said that while City Attorney Nick Ward-Willis had moments earlier provided an “excellent explanation” of the sale process and council members’ responsibility to seek the highest return, he felt “that could have been communicated earlier; it might have allayed a lot of concerns.”

City Administrator Chris White said Wednesday that he was hopeful the sale would be finalized next week. 

Earlier this month, a real-estate agency hired by the city listed Mase, at 425 Main St., for $1.95 million and the former Beacon Engine Co. firehouse at 57 East Main St. for $1.75 million. Both properties became surplus after a $14.7 million centralized fire station opened near City Hall last fall.

On Monday, Ward-Willis explained that state law allows a municipality to withhold details of a sale until a contract has been signed. “Similar to a private deal, you don’t negotiate in public, especially on the financial terms,” he said. 

The council’s vote authorized White to move forward with the sale and acknowledged that an ownership transfer would not negatively impact the environment. If the new owner, as expected, submits plans to redevelop the three-story brick building, they will be subject to Planning Board review, including for environmental impacts. 

At the Monday meeting, Beacon resident Theresa Kraft criticized the pending sale, saying a council member voting “yes” could be labeled “a traitor, a crook, a pawn in a larger game.”

“It’s like pawning your grandfather’s gold watch to pay a bill,” she said. “The bills keep piling up, and once the watch is gone, you lose a cherished family heirloom.” She asked the council to call for a public referendum before proceeding with a sale. 

Ward-Willis responded later, noting that state law permits only certain situations, such as the issuance of bonds or a change to the city charter, to go to voters. As elected representatives, he said, the council must decide most matters. 

“With the sale of a property or the purchase of a snowplow, you’re not allowed to go to the public and do a poll,” he said. “You don’t have the authority to send it to the public. You’ve been elected and you need to do your job.”

Addressing other suggestions made recently, Ward-Willis said the city had considered repurposing the building but a law that requires multiple contractors for public construction projects made conversion impractical. Modern accessibility codes also do not apply to the building as long as it is a fire station, but “when you kick it over to a different use, whether it’s a community center, whether it’s a city hall, that triggers a whole set of rules which the city has to comply with,” he said. 

The city received multiple offers for the former station, Ward-Willis said. Charlotte Guernsey, the owner of Gate House Compass Realty, the city’s broker, recommended the pending offer as “the highest and best,” he said. 

The decommissioned Mase and Beacon Engine stations are both part of Beacon’s protected historic district. City officials said both former firehouses would be sold with covenants that restrict renaming the properties or altering or defacing their historical features. Any changes to the exterior of the buildings will require a “certificate of appropriateness” from the Planning Board. 

While a sale is pending at Mase, Beacon Engine’s ownership has been challenged. State Judge Thomas Davis on Tuesday (May 20) recused himself from litigation brought against the city by retired members of the volunteer fire company that used the station as its headquarters for 136 years. Davis, who presided over the lawsuit filed in 2023 by St. Andrew & St. Luke Episcopal Church over a city-owned parking lot adjacent to the new fire station, did not provide a reason. Judge Christi Acker was assigned to the case. 

In March, Judge Maria Rosa dismissed a request from the firefighters that she prevent them from being evicted and delay the city’s plans to sell the building to help finance the central station. A week later, the firefighters filed a complaint asking for judgment on whether the volunteer company or the city owns the historic structure. 

When the council voted in 2020 to close Beacon Engine, both the retired volunteers and city officials believed the fire company owned two-thirds of the building — the original 1889 structure — with the city holding an engine bay added in 1924. Since then, Beacon officials conducted a title search that they say revealed municipal ownership of the entire site. The volunteers have disputed that, saying ownership is unclear because of “aged, handwritten deeds” and “incomplete searches and conclusory assertions” by the city.

The volunteers submitted an amended complaint on May 14 claiming they had commissioned a title search that “created a potential ownership interest in [the fire company’s] favor.” The complaint referred to language in two deeds which “exempts and reserves the lot occupied by the Old Engine House,” although no deeds were submitted to the court. The fire company asked to be declared the owner of the property. 

City attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the complaint a day later. In addition to numerous deeds, the city submitted the testimony of Paul Conrad, president of the Poughkeepsie-based Real Property Abstract & Title Services. 

Conrad said the firefighters had misinterpreted the two deeds and that a dozen documents, dating from 1860 to 1921, establish the city’s ownership. “Beacon Engine at one point in time owned a portion of the property, which it subsequently conveyed to the city over a century ago,” he said. “Beacon Engine was never in title to the entirety of the property, and it last had an ownership interest in the property in 1920, almost 105 years ago.”