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Geneva school board picks up pace on selling Keslinger Road site

The Geneva school board has put on the market land on which it once intended to build a maintenance building and bus storage.

The board voted unanimously Monday on the process to sell 28 acres at Brundige and Keslinger roads. It will first take sealed bids. The minimum acceptable bid is $2.2 million, which would cover how much the district paid for the land plus what the district had to pay toward repairs and improvements on the Brundige Road bridge, said Donna Oberg, assistant superintendent for business services.

District 304 Board President Mark Grosso said it was “one of my favorite items” on Monday's agenda. He had criticized the purchase while running for office in 2009, and pushed to stop the project shortly after he was elected.

If the district doesn't receive the minimum bid by sealed bids, then the property will go to auction, again with a minimum bid of $2.2 million. If that doesn't work, it could then list it with a real estate agent and sell it for any amount.

The land is zoned for industrial use. The district bought it in 2006 for $1.6 million, thinking part of it could be used for three practice athletics fields. Those fields would have replaced the ones lost when Williamsburg Elementary School was built. But it found it would have to build a stormwater retention area that would take up 30 percent of the site.

The district also wanted a place where it could park all of its buses. The current bus garage holds 43 inside and seven outside; more than another dozen buses are parked at the middle schools overnight.

The property would have centralized the storage of the district's maintenance and related equipment.

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