The town of Norway doesn’t own the Norway Opera House, but it does own the right to maintain the clock in the building’s tower and it certainly owns – at least in part – the building’s current dilapidated condition.

The Main Street structure – featured on the town seal – has been owned by hands-off out-of-staters for decades, and townspeople and town officials have been fully aware of its steady deterioration. It would not be correct to say the town did nothing, but it would be correct to say it did not do enough.

In 2000, Town Manager David Holt said then-owner Ralph Doering Jr. “hasn’t put much effort in keeping the building safe.”

That’s a decided understatement.

Windows throughout the building were boarded up, pipes were leaking, vandals had punched holes through exterior walls, and the once-grand ballroom was home to dozens of dead pigeons and to live birds and their piles of waste.

Although Doering had liability insurance on the building, its condition was so unsafe that longtime clockwright and jeweler Mike Lovejoy, who had cared for the opera house clock for the previous decade, decided that climbing the steep stairs and vertical ladder in a poorly maintained tower just wasn’t worth the risk. “I want to quit while I’m in one piece,” he said of his decision to abandon the clockworks.

Doering bought the building in the mid-1980s and made next to no effort to maintain its integrity. To be fair, he did make an effort to beautify the place in 2000, putting a coat of paint on the storefronts and removing the pigeons, at least temporarily. The cosmetic effort was minimal, and townspeople knew it.

There was a genuine effort that year made by a small preservation group to purchase the building from Doering. The group was energetic about raising money to rehab the building and return it to use as a ballroom and theater, hoping to re-create a social center at the opera house and provide a little sizzle of economic development in the shopping district.

Voters rejected a request by the preservation group to raise $125,000, money that could have been matched by a Community Development Block Grant, to acquire the building. So, the opera house continued to sit, neglected by its developer-owner, who didn’t develop much there.

After pipes – including the building’s sprinkler system – burst in 2003, causing extensive interior water damage throughout the structure, Doering sold it to Barry Mazzaglia of New Hampshire, a developer, who carried on the tradition of neglect. That was the same year the building was named to Maine’s most-endangered historic properties list.

The dramatic irony here is that the town once owned this majestic building. It was purchased in 1920 and sold to Mike Quinn in 1970, but the town kept the right to maintain the clock. And taxpayers have willingly spent thousands of dollars to do that over the years.

The clock works, but the building is a shambles and the recent burst pipes have created a critical need for officials to make a decision about the building. The owner has closed the building until spring because it’s in danger of collapsing. It just doesn’t make sense to let the opera house set and sag through the winter without immediate repair.

Selectmen meet tonight, and condemnation on the building is on the table.

This is not a let’s-decide-this-later moment. Condemn it or force repair now.

This town has watched the decay long enough.