A Charleston landlord has withdrawn his bids for two abandoned elementary schools on the city's West Side, and Kanawha County Schools Superintendent Ron Duerring said this week he doesn't know what the public school system will now do with the property.
The withdrawal comes after a previously interested buyer Duerring mentioned in March 2015 never purchased the properties, and after a nonprofit group's plan to host a court diversion program for juvenile offenders in one of the schools, J.E. Robins, received backlash from the surrounding community and didn't receive state funding.
In a July 13, 2016, auction, landlord Tony Romeo Jr. made the highest bids for the Robins and Watts schools and the land they sit on. There was only one other bidder.
But because Romeo's bids were lower than the minimum bid amounts set for each property - $53,000 was the minimum for Watts and $76,000 for Robins; Romeo bid $20,000 and $11,000, respectively - he didn't automatically win the auction. Alan Cummings, the school system's purchasing director, said the Kanawha school board had the authority to decide whether to approve the sale of the properties for less than the minimum bids.
Between the auction and Aug. 5, when Romeo asked to withdraw his bids, the board held two regular meetings, where board members neither discussed nor took a vote on selling the properties to Romeo.
Sue Rayhill, who lives two blocks from Watts and attended the school in the 1960s, told board members at a July meeting she was "disappointed" in the auction and that she and her neighbors want the property to be used for something positive for the area, such as senior housing, child care or a neighborhood center.
Romeo, according to Cummings, wrote in an Aug. 5 letter to Jay Goldman, who auctioned the buildings, that "Due to lack of interest in selling old Robins and Watts school buildings I will withdraw my offer and want my deposit returned."
Goldman, owner of the Charleston-based Goldman Associates real estate and auction firm, said Romeo told him he was looking for the board to move on either selling or denying sale of the properties, but didn't get an answer.
"He made the comment that probably it wasn't the hottest thing on his plate about buying it," Goldman said. "So he may have felt relieved."
Romeo, who had said he was considering turning both buildings into apartments, defended his track record as a property owner and declined to comment about why he withdrew his bids when contacted Tuesday by the Gazette-Mail.
The future of the properties hasn't been discussed in board meetings since Romeo withdrew his bid.
"Right now, dealing with everything else, that's kind of been on the back burner," Duerring said.
The schools, both about 80 years old, closed at the end of the 2013-14 school year and their students were transferred to the new Edgewood Elementary. Both have also been subjected to vandalism and complaints from neighbors, though the school system only boarded them up around the end of May of this year.
"The goal is to just move the buildings as quickly as possible, to benefit the community," Cummings told the Gazette-Mail the week of the auction. "You've seen the condition that they're in and they're only getting worse, and we want to get what we can while we're still able to auction them. So we are moving quickly on it."
He said the minimum bids of $53,000 for the Watts building and land and $76,000 for the Robins building and land were the same as the appraised values provided - without adjustments to reflect any damage - by Charleston-based Rolston & Company. The Kanawha County assessor's office still has the Watts building and land appraised value at $628,000 and the Robins building and land appraised value at $803,700.
"I don't think they're realistic," Goldman said of the assessor's values, noting that property tax-exempt public entities, like school systems, are less motivated than private owners to try to persuade the assessor to lower properties' appraised values, on which the assessed values and the taxes private owners must pay are based.
"You've got buildings that were state of the art probably in the 1920s," Goldman said of the difficulties in selling the properties. He noted they're also in residential areas.
"If you rehabilitate them it would cost a fortune, if you tear them down it would cost a fortune," he said. "Nobody is going to put a commercial business up on top of Watts' street or where Robins is, there's just no demand for it."
Kanawha school board President Jim Crawford didn't return calls for comment Tuesday.
"There were a lot of concerns that were raised by people in the community about what might be done with the property, and that's why I was not super excited," board member Ryan White said of Romeo's bid. He said residents expressed concerns about the history of buildings Romeo has owned in the past.
White also noted the low bid amount. He said he didn't tell other board members that they should keep the issue off meeting agendas.
Board member Ric Cavender said he didn't know why the issue never hit an agenda. He said he did hear concerns from residents about Romeo's track record as a property owner.
"I would just say that we have a responsibility to ensure that any future use of any building that we own or sell is going to be positive for the surrounding neighborhood that it's in," Cavender said.
Reach Ryan Quinn at ryan.quinn@wvgazettemail.com, facebook.com/ryanedwinquinn, 304-348-1254 or follow @RyanEQuinn on Twitter.