Perini Building Purchase Moves Ahead, With Plenty Of Questions

FRAMINGHAM, MA — The City Council moved Mayor Yvonne Spicer's nearly $13 million plan to buy the Perini office building forward at Tuesday night's meeting, but not before a lengthy — and sometimes contentious — round of questioning.

Tuesday's meeting began with School Committee chair Adam Freudberg and District 6 member Geoffrey Epstein asking the Council to delay discussion of the purchase because of a somewhat complicated lease deal involving the School Department.

The department leases a portion of the Perini Building, and the lease just expired on Jan. 31. Both the School Committee and City Council had voted to extend the lease for one year. But that runs counter to another deal the mayor's office had made with the Perini owners for a three-month extension. Amid the back and forth, the Perini owners put the school department on a month-to-month lease as of Feb. 1.

"I'm asking you to take a pause to allow officials to address this landlord-tenant dispute as a top priority," Freudberg said on Tuesday.

Spicer forwarded her plan to buy the Perini building to City Council last week. According to the deal, Framingham would pay $12.95 million for the 105,000 square-foot building along Mt. Wayte Avenue. Most city offices at the Memorial Building would move there, including the mayor's office. The city would borrow about $9.3 million and use about $3.2 million in existing funds for the purchase.

Buying the building would free up space at the Memorial Building and allow the city to save on the School Department lease, an estimated $478,000. The Framingham Heart Study would remain in the Perini building, and the city would become the new landlord and assume the organization's $555,000 lease. The building would cost about $464,000 to operate each year.

District 6 Councilor Philip Ottaviani, a local real estate agent, seemed to be most skeptical of the deal. Based on other local real estate deals he's seen, the city might end up paying more in operating costs, he said.

Councilors were also worried about the building coming off the tax rolls under municipal ownership. The building's tax bill would be spread out across all residential and commercial property tax payers, finance director Mary Ellen Kelly confirmed.

Spicer attended the meeting to answer questions, and was accused of pursuing the deal without collaboration from the Council and School Committee. She provided documents to the Council showing a series of meetings about the Perini purchase dating back to February 2019 involving other city officials, including Freudberg and Superintendent Robert Tremblay.

"This was not happening in a vacuum. All of us were engaged on one level or another," she said.

Freudberg remarked that "the process is backwards" because of the outstanding lease issue. The Council decided to send the lease issue to the School Committee before taking further action — that discussion will likely take place at the Feb. 5 school board meeting.

At the end of the discussion, the Council voted unanimously to send the Perini purchase to the next step, which is a review by the City Council Finance Subcommittee.