OXFORD — Town Manager Adam Garland told selectmen Thursday night that the town office property on Pleasant Street will be officially for sale by close of business Friday.

The building and land will be listed by Patrick Casalinova of The Fletcher Group in Portland.

Selectman Floyd Thayer wanted to know if the broker, with no appraisal, had a sales number in mind.

In the busy housing market real estate appraisers are spread thin, Garland said, and without an appraisal Casalinova will list it as “accepting offers.”

“So, if someone offers you a $100, you’re going to take it?” Thayer asked. “It seems to me that somebody ought to put some sort of a number on it.”

Garland told him that without an appraisal in hand the broker said it would be best to not slug a number in.

Vice Chairwoman Sharon Jackson suggested Garland look at the most recent assessed value as a starting point.

Garland agreed and said he believes it to be around $700,000 but it’s outdated. He will review it with Oxford’s assessor.

With voters rejecting a proposal this year that would have moved Oxford’s administrative employees from the mildewed and deteriorating building at 85 Pleasant St. to temporary space at Oxford Plaza, selectmen were left to once again attempt to patch up unsafe conditions with cleaning and mold remediation.

Immediately after the June 5 annual town meeting, Garland reached out to SERVPRO for recommendations on how to proceed. The building has undergone multiple attempts at remediation and sanitization cleaning at least three times in recent years but conditions have continued to worsen.

Voters decided at the June 5 annual Town Meeting to sell the building, which served as the town high school for decades.

In other business, Garland said he received an invoice from the Maine Department of Transportation for $37,000 for manhole/roadwork done to Routes 26/121 in 2018. The original cost was estimated in 2017 to be $17,600. The work had to be redone and in August of 2018 the department amended the cost to $37,600 and completed it in 2019.

Two years later the invoice was submitted for $37,000. Given the long period between completion and billing, Garland had the finance department review whether the bill had been paid.

Selectmen questioned the doubling of the charges and who had approved the extra amount. The first estimate had been authorized by selectmen at a meeting in 2017, but the following expense had not been discussed by the board.

“When we looked back at that time period, we found that $17,600 had been authorized for the town manager to sign a contract,” for the work to be done, Garland explained. “The amendment, we had a hard time finding in any minutes. I did find an amendment that was signed by the former manager approving the additional.”

“Did selectmen approve the additional?” Sharon Jackson asked. “I don’t remember that piece ever coming before this board.”

“I could not find anything to that,” Garland said.

Since the work was done so long ago, Garland told selectmen there is no line item for it in the Highway Department’s current budget.

Selectmen approved a motion to pay the $37,000 and to transfer the funds from the town’s unassigned funds balance policy account to the Highway Department account.

Selectmen also approved a mass gathering permit for the Oxford County Agricultural Fair, which will be held Sept. 15-18.

The board voted to accept a $20,000 grant for laptops to be installed in Police Department cruisers. The grant comes from the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation.

Garland said the Fire Department will apply for a grant as well, although multiple grants in the same community may not be allowed in the same year.

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