3/17/07 Moose Lodge files lawsuit against county

(As published by Cortland Standard, Corey Preston reporting)

A threatened lawsuit regarding the Legislature’s decision to back out of purchasing a number of properties along south Main Street became a reality Thursday, as an attorney for the Moose Lodge, the central property in the deal, filed suit in State Supreme Court.
Attorney Russ Ruthig said Friday that he and his clients would not wait indefinitely for the county to respond to his request that the county go through with the purchase of the Moose Lodge property at 157 Main St.
“We were asked to defer because this was going to be taken care of at the March 22 meeting, but now I’m reading in the paper that they’re going to talk about it April 5, so the big question is, when are they going to respond?” Ruthig said. “I had to do it, now we’ll see what the reaction is.”
A special legislative committee has been looking for the past month at the aborted deal and how the county should respond to the complaints of Ruthig, who also represents the owners of 11 Williams St., and attorneys for two other property owners involved in the deal.
The committee came up with six potential options, four of which involved purchasing all or some of the properties to avoid a lawsuit, and a special meeting was scheduled for April 5 to discuss those options.
County Attorney Ric Van Donsel and Legislature Chairman Marilyn Brown (D-8th Ward) could not be reached for comment Friday.
Ruthig’s lawsuit charges that the county’s initial decision to purchase the properties on Dec. 21 represented a binding agreement.
The motion to reconsider that the Legislature passed Jan. 25, effectively killing the deal, was inappropriate, the suit says, for two reasons.
First of all, the clause in the contract making any deal contingent on government approval expired Dec. 22, with no notice from the county otherwise.
Secondly, the suit claims, the motion to reconsider was inappropriate, and should have been considered a “motion to rescind,” requiring a two-thirds-majority vote that the motion did not have.
The lawsuit requests that the court compel the county to go through with the purchase of the Moose Lodge at the agreed price of $247,500, or that the county be forced to simply pay $247,500 in damages, along with attorney fees.
Because the other potential complainants in the case — the owners of 11 Williams St., 8 Randall St. and the owners of Robbins Tobacco — will likely produce a similar lawsuit, Ruthig said they could be filed at any time, and the county would likely deal with all of them at once