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After several years of weighing its options and hearing multiple proposals for the property, the Jefferson County Commission has decided to put the 16.68-acre parcel and all buildings that once housed Louisville High School and most recently Louisville Middle School up for sale.
The property, located at 1301 School Street, Louisville, includes 117,000 square feet of buildings under roofs, a gymnasium, ball field, and walking track, bordered by School, Price and Sinqufield streets.
“The county has kicked around ideas about using it for something, but in the end, the county doesn’t have a use for it and the cost of us making it usable is too expensive,” said Jefferson County Administrator Jerry Coalson. “We’ve tried to use it as a community food pantry and some things like that. A lot of people wanted us just to give it to them, but we can’t give away a government asset, so we’re going to put it up for sale.”
The county decided to list the property on www.govdeals.com. The property will be advertised there, listed in the local newspaper, and Coalson said that the companies, agencies, organizations and individuals who have come before the county asking about the property will be notified that it is for sale.
The property was given to the county by the Jefferson County School Board more than four years ago after the opening of the newly consolidated Jefferson County Middle School.
The county voted to include a condition of the sale that the property cannot be used for K-12 educational purposes in perpetuity for 20 years.
“The board doesn’t have anything against charter schools, but the property was given to us by the board of education, and we didn’t want to turn around and sell it to someone who would open a school there,” Coalson said. “We didn’t think that was a good, neighborly thing to do.”
The main structure of the building was built in the 1950s, but several additions have been added to the structure since then.
Coalson said that the county had once investigated moving its county offices to that property but decided that the costs associated with maintaining or remodeling the buildings would be too expensive.
“We’ve had a couple of non-profit groups kind of get together and ask to buy it or rent it, but so far it is extremely difficult for those people to mount a real program to do that,” Coalson said. “We’re not in the rental or landlord business and we don’t want to be. And generally speaking, unless you have some kind of state funded self-sustaining program to go in there, it’s not usually something we can work with.”
Coalson said that the company who surveyed the property for the county in preparation for the sale, said that often vocational tech schools, children’s homes, and developers interested in converting the old buildings into subsidized housing sometimes bid on properties like this one.
Over the last several years, Jefferson County’s commission has sold over $1.5 million in equipment using GovDeals, but this will be the first time it has attempted to list real estate with the company.
“Over the next two months they’ll come out and take a bunch of pictures and develop the listing and put it on their site,” Coalson said. “They’ll blast it out to a bunch of investors and people who subscribe to GovDeals and locally we’ll run it in the newspaper. I think there have been three groups have inquired about the building and we’ll send it to them and let them know it is available if they want to go make a bid on it.”
While the county has not discussed setting a minimum price, it has reserved the right to reject any bids it feels are unacceptable.
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