The long saga of Goddard College’s dissolution has a new twist. After striking a deal nearly two months ago, the school said last week it was once again welcoming bids for its Plainfield campus.
In late May, the school agreed on a sale worth $3.4 million with an unnamed buyer for the 117-acre property. The move provoked widespread criticism from Goddard’s students and faculty, including from a group that filed for a temporary injunction to try to halt the sale.
However, in a July 8 email to previously rejected bidders, as first reported by Seven Days, the school’s interim chief financial officer, Kenneth Macur, invited interested parties to once again present a new bid for Goddard’s campus, name and trademarks.
The email did not say why the first deal fell apart. Neither Macur nor Lisa Larivee, clerk of Goddard’s board of trustees, immediately responded to requests for comment on Wednesday morning.
In a letter attached to his July 8 email, Macur laid out the terms for any new bid, including “a firm closing date between August 1 and August 15,” and payment of the full price at closing “with no financing contingencies.”
Among the letter’s recipients was Cooperation Vermont, a local nonprofit focused on climate resilience, which tried to buy the Goddard campus when it originally went up for sale in early April. Michelle Eddleman McCormick, the group’s director, said it had submitted an updated bid, but that Macur’s timeline for a full-price cash sale was unrealistic.
“I don’t know who they think is going to pull out $3.4 million out of their liquid assets and do that basically in three weeks,” she said.
If it were to purchase the campus, Cooperation Vermont has said it would maintain the leases of the institutions on campus and embark on community-aid projects. McCormick said the group had raised $1.2 million in donation pledges if a deal could be reached. The group also worked on a $2 million loan application with the Cooperative Fund of the Northeast but “can’t move forward until there’s a sales agreement.”
“If they’d engaged with us in good faith back then, we could’ve closed a deal two times over,” McCormick said.
McCormick said the group had engaged in a small back-and-forth with the board after submitting their bid but had not heard back since. In his July 8 email, Macur said bids had to be delivered to him before July 12. It is unclear how many bids the college’s board has received this time around.
After several months of feeling like Cooperation Vermont’s proposals were brushed off, McCormick lamented that Goddard’s campus remained unsold and unused — especially in light of the recent floods that devastated Plainfield and left many residents without housing and basic services.
“We have this campus up the hill that could be doing so much for the community at this time,” McCormick said.
