By MARJORIE NEEDHAM
Ray and Penny Albini of Chase Parkway Memorial/The Albini Family Funeral Home hope to build a crematory in an industrial-zoned area of Middlebury. At their April 20 meeting, the Middlebury Board of Selectmen (BoS) voted to sign a contract with the Albinis for purchase of the 33 or so acres the town acquired from Baker Residential Limited Partnership in lieu of taxes.
If the real estate deal closes, the town will be paid $200,000 for the property. Baker Residential owed $75,109.02 in back taxes, so the property would be selling for approximately $125,000 more than what was owed in unpaid taxes.
Ray Albini said funeral homes are seeing an increase in the number of requests for cremation. The cremation rate has risen to 35 percent, he said, from about 20 percent 10 years ago and 10 percent 20 years ago.
Plans for the site will not be finalized until the proposal has received all the necessary approvals, but Ray Albini said he and his wife are considering several features. Since this area doesn’t have a cremation cemetery, they would like to offer that. “Ideally, I would like to have a crematory with a chapel and some type of indoor area like a columbarium for cremains (cremated remains).” He likened a columbarium for cremains to a mausoleum for bodies.
There would be a cremation cemetery outside. And there might be an ossuarium. He said this is a monument above underground storage of cremains. Names of the deceased are placed on the monument, and during a ceremony, the cremains are put into a cylinder and placed into the underground storage.
He said it was hard to tell how long it might be before the project, if approved, could be completed. In addition to obtaining the required local approvals, he was told the application for state approval is pretty complicated and takes 9 months.
He said he and his wife have been looking for properties for about a year. The Middlebury property met all their criteria. “It’s in an industrial zone. It’s more than 500 feet away from residential housing and that’s a state law. I think it’s a great location, and I think it’s a beautiful piece of property,” he said.
In this aerial view, the land the Albinis have offered to purchase, the former Baker Residential property, can be seen in relation to Chemtura and Brookside. (Terrence McAuliffe photos)
The property is on Benson Road, in an industrial area across from Chemtura. It is in the Oxford Airport Enterprise Zone, which was approved in August 2013 and is designed to attract business growth and development in the area.
Business incentives in the zone, subject to certain conditions, are a five-year, 80-percent abatement of local property taxes on real and personal property or a 10-year, 25- to 50-percent credit on a portion of the state’s corporation business tax.
At the time the town acquired the property St. John said the acquisition would give the town an opportunity to sell it to recoup its losses on the unpaid taxes. He said the property also would tie in perfectly with the tax incentive program for new or improved businesses that was created by the town’s Economic and Industrial Development Commission.
The signed offer to purchase now moves on to the Planning and Zoning Commission. If it is approved there, it will go to a town meeting for vote.
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