AUGUSTA – Legislative oversight committees will review the state’s sale of property near the former state prison in Thomaston to the current prison warden for $175,000 — far less than its $458,000 assessed value.

The property was sold June 9 to Warden Patricia Barnhart and Sheehan Gallagher through a real estate firm, CBRE Boulos. The property includes a house that for years was provided to wardens, and two other buildings.

“It definitely raises some red flags,” said Sen. Garrett Mason, R-Lisbon Falls.

Mason said the Legislature’s Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, which monitors corrections issues, will look into the sale.

Mason said lawmakers want to make sure that the law was followed scrupulously. “We want to make sure this was as transparent as a pane of glass,” he said.

Sen. Roger Katz, R-Augusta, co-chairman of the Government Oversight Committee, said he has requested files of the sale from the state Bureau of General Services and the town of Thomaston, and will share them with other members of the committee. The members, who meet periodically, will then decide whether to take the review further.

“There may be a perfectly valid explanation,” Katz said.

Betty Lamoreau, acting director of the Bureau of General Services, said the sale was proper and her agency is under pressure from the Legislature to sell properties to help balance the state budget.

The lot includes three buildings, one of them a house that Barnhart has occupied since she became warden in 2009. The house had been provided by the state to wardens as part of their compensation.

Thomaston Town Manager Valmore Blastow Jr. confirmed that the assessed value of the property, next to the site of the prison that was razed several years ago, is $458,000. He said that on July 12 the town’s planning board will consider Barnhart’s request for a seven-lot residential subdivision on the site.

Lamoreau said the town’s assessment was done years ago, and a more recent “opinion of value” by Boulos reduced the market figure. Two other properties the state sold recently in Thomaston fetched less than their assessed values, she said.

“It’s been a really bad time to sell real estate here,” Lamoreau said.

 

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