The town purchased the Sky Office building at the corner of the Esplanade and Forrester Street at the end of December as a future development site to be used in conjunction with the site of the former Truro Junior High School.
Following the sale, Mayor Bill Mills and town CAO Jim Langille refused to disclose the purchase price on the basis that it could jeopardize potential tenders or sales of the property.
“We are currently negotiating with a developer for that whole area,” Langille recently told the Truro Daily News. “And I have no problem with the purchase price, I thought we got a fair deal on that. But the value that we are going to be placing on the three acres we have there may be impacted if the developer thinks that we paid more or less for that particular building.”
The assessed market value for the building is $416,900.
Town council is to deal with approval for the property purchase at its March 4 meeting, Langille said, and the purchase price and how the sale will be funded is to be disclosed at that point.
Since making those comments, however, the purchase price has been added to the Property Valuations Service’s Corp’s (PVSC) website, which went online in mid January.
The province enacted legislation last spring that requires purchasers to record the price of all property sales to the site, which is available for public viewing.
Purchasers are required to complete the deed transfer tax affidavit as prescribed under the Municipal Government Act. The affidavits are collected at the Registry of Deeds and a copy is forwarded to the municipality and the information is shared with the PVSC for assessment purposes.
“It’s for the public to review sale prices and just for them to deem whether they believe their assessment is market value,” said PVSC spokesman Philip Schofield.
Provincial and federal property purchases are exempt from paying the deed transfer tax but municipal-government purchases are not exempt.
