No takers yet for shuttered school

Does nobody want the Banks School?

No usable responses were received to a Waltham request for proposals to turn the surplused former Banks School into housing or services for the developmentally disabled. The lease term specified under the request was considered too short by the nonprofits that generally run services for the disabled and by any firm that would consider using the site for housing.

Now the city must decide how to tweak the bid documents to attract more applicants. It might need to go so far as to seek a special act from the Legislature to allow an extension of the lease term on the city property to a period greater than 10 years.

Mayor Jeannette McCarthy said the city is trying to determine how long a lease term must be to attract organizations or developers. She expects to submit the special act request to the City Council later this month.

The request for proposals was written with the promise that "the city will consider seeking a special act of the Legislature for a longer lease term," but it was apparently against state bidding rules to include that line. Therefore, any bids that required a longer lease term would have been rejected as invalid. For reasons that are not yet clear, this was not known until after the request was released to the public.

Nonetheless, two responses to the request had come in by the Aug. 6 deadline. One response, a letter from GWARC, a nonprofit advocacy group for people with mental retardation, declined the opportunity to bid.

"The cost of renovations and the expense of rent for a building that we could not own and that carries a 10-year lease makes this less than ideal for our agency's future growth and sustainablity," read the letter, signed by GWARC chief executive officer Roslynn Rubin.

The second response included a joint proposal from the Waltham Alliance to Create Housing and Cascap Realty. Conditional upon being granted a longer lease term, it was rejected because with that requirement, the proposal failed to conform to the criteria identified in the RFP.

Alex Marthews, executive director of the alliance, said the rejection took him by surprise, and said the city should have found a way to clarify the language to all the interested bidders.

Marthews said that coming up with an affordable housing project under a 10-year lease is all but impossible. The subsidies and grant funding that make below-market rents possible can take years to set up, and many of the funding sources require that the housing they're helping to create will be available long-term, Marthews said.

"You're bringing together eight to 10 sources of funding and each has different terms, but in general, funders want to see that what they are investing in will remain there for a substantial period of time, and the longer the better," said Marthews.

His alliance and Cascap Realty had proposed to renovate the building to include 30 units of affordable housing aimed at low- and moderate-income renters. That would include 10 one-bedroom apartments, 12 two-bedrooms, five three-bedrooms, and three four-bedroom units. Five percent of the units and parking would be reserved for those with disabilities. Where legally possible, preference would be given Waltham residents and veterans.

Cascap Realty is the real estate and property management arm of Cascap Inc., a nonprofit that provides services for the elderly and disabled, but the housing would be open to households without disabled or elderly members.

McCarthy submitted the original draft RFP to the City Council in January 2006, where it was referred to the council's RFP (request for proposals) Committee for revision. The committee's chairman, At-Large Councilor David H. Marcou Jr., blamed McCarthy for the failure of the RFP.

"The mayor drafts the RFP. The mayor crafted it in a way that I said all along that there [would be] a low likelihood of getting any bidders," Marcou said. He said he believes that the property should have been put up for sale instead of lease, an option he said McCarthy rejected.

Marcou said the committee had asked the mayor to request a special act allowing a longer lease during their deliberations. "We did all that," he said. "There were discussions about how the special act would be submitted."

But the city clerk's office could find no record of the committee asking McCarthy to make that request.

McCarthy said she had been willing to submit a special act before the request was sent out for bids, but had not been asked to do so. She said she had tried to cooperate with the committee throughout the process. Asked if the process could have been done faster, she said, "I'm not going to comment about that."

Stephanie V. Siek can be reached at ssiek@globe.com.