ABOVE: Red area shows the lands previously owned by SLC/Holcim, recently purchased by Colarusso for $8.75M. The 1,800 acres is 50% larger than the entire City of Hudson.
Colarusso Ventures LLC paid $8,750,000 to acquire 20 parcels of land from Holcim (US), according to new records recently posted by the County.
The parcel sales—3 in Hudson, 17 in Greenport—were concluded on October 27th, 2014, but were not reflected in County records as of late December. No RP-5217 sales records were on file with the Real Property Department at that time. And documents then in the Clerk’s office merely showed Colarusso acquiring easements and title to a railroad overpass. But sometime between December 24th and today, records of an actual sale have made it into the County’s system.
The price of $8.75 million is far less than most would have predicted. Proponents of the deeply flawed Local Waterfront Revitalization Plan (LWRP) for Hudson, favoring the interests of extractive mining businesses, wagged their fingers that acquiring the Waterfront land by sale would be prohibitively expensive.
Then-City Attorney Cheryl Roberts likewise scoffed derisively at any idea of rezoning the waterfront in favor of benign commercial, recreational, and conservation uses, speciously arguing that it would be deemed a “taking” in court, and cost the City tens or even hundreds of millions.
Today, individual buildings in Hudson sell for more than $1 million. And Colarusso appears to have bought all of Holcim’s 1,800 acres—not just its 117 acres on the waterfront—for under $10 million. The property now owned by Colarusso is larger than the entire City of Hudson (2.8 vs. 2.3 square miles).
The shortsightedness of that thinking, which foreclosed the possibility of a truly ambitious Waterfront development to complement Hudson’s main street, has seldom been thrown in starker relief.
