NORWAY – Concern over an apparent delay in the town’s request for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against the owner of the damaged Opera House is unfounded, Oxford County Superior Court Clerk Donna Howe said recently.

“Nothing has been done inappropriately,” she said.

A hearing on a motion for the order has been set for Wednesday, June 17, Howe said. The hearing on the preliminary injunction request is expected to be heard in August.

Last February, the town filed the motion to try to force Opera House owner Barry Mazzaglia of Bitim Enterprises in New Hampshire to immediately stabilize the historic three-story brick building on Main Street.

A portion of the sagging roof collapsed in September 2007 under the weight of water, damaging supports and flooding out first-floor businesses. Since that time, officials have grown increasingly concerned about the stability of the 1894 building and seemingly limited response from the owner.

Two engineering studies have deemed the building “unsafe to the public and neighboring property.”

Some local officials have been questioning why the case has not been heard yet.

Town Manager David Holt told the Board of Selectmen at its June 4 meeting that the attorney representing the town in the case believed the clerk may have confused the town’s case with one Mazzaglia has with several former tenants.

The attorney, James Belleau of the Auburn firm of Skelton, Taintor and Abbott, did not return phone calls from the Sun Journal last week.

Howe said the case was filed properly, but the hearing on the preliminary injunction became complicated by the lack of available days, in part due to the scheduling of a double murder trial this month.

Howe said she pulled the file early on, waiting for opposition to file its motion.

“They (Bitim Enterprises) had 21 days. That (the response) came in March. I had already done the April scheduling. The next term would have been June. We have one week for civil and criminal trials,” she explained.

Howe said she now hopes to get a date in August. Cases are heard every other month in Superior Court.

“It will be heard. We’re usually very expeditious in how we handle cases,” Howe said.

On June 3, she said attorney Belleau asked her to schedule the hearing for the temporary restraining order for June. “I pulled the file to do that. It has been scheduled,” she said.

The Opera House is considered the anchor to the town’s downtown National Historic District with its first floor storefronts, ballroom, theater and balcony on the upper floors, and distinctive bell tower housing an E. Howard clock.

It was once the center of community life, with concerts, balls, dances, traveling minstrel shows, theater performances, National Guard musters, town meetings and high school graduations.

It was built by the Norway Building Association, then owned by the town from 1920 to the mid-1970s, and then by a succession of private owners for the past 30 years or so. The upper floors have been vacant since the ’70s and the bottom floor since September 2007. Mazzaglia bought it in 2003 for $225,000. It was not insured at the time of the roof collapse.

Selectman Bill Damon offered him $250,000 for it this year and was turned down.