388 Orange St., now owned by ACES.
A North Haven-based regional arts education organization has purchased a two-and-a-half story law office building on Orange Street for $975,000, with plans to convert that site into school “programmatic” spaces after the current tenant’s lease runs out next year.
That property sale took place on Aug. 5, according to a public filing on the city’s online land records database.
The Area Cooperative Educational Services, or ACES, bought the two-and-a-half story office building at 388 Orange St. from Leonard Fasano for $975,000.
The city last appraised the property as worth $805,400.
ECA's main building, right next to 388 Orange.
ACES Executive Director Tom Danehy told the Independent in an email comment that the educational organization purchased 388 Orange St. because it is right next to two other properties that ACES already owns: the Educational Center for the Arts main school building at the corner of Orange and Audubon Streets, and the Little Theatre property around the corner on Lincoln Street.
“The purchased property allows for developmental enhancements and parking for our arts magnet high school,” Danehy said. “ACES recently sold a property on Trumbull Street and the location of this property affords better access, safer campus proximities, and programming in one contiguous area.”
That recent Trumbull Street property sale that Danehy referenced took place on May 12 of this year, when ACES sold the 10,000-plus square-foot Elizabethan mansion at 51 Trumbull St. for $800,000 to the Friends of John Slade Ely House of Contemporary Art, Inc. ACES had bought the art gallery building on Trumbull Street in a probate sale back in 2016, and, after originally planning on selling it to a residential developer, wound up selling it instead to the local arts nonprofit that runs the Ely Center for Contemporary Art, or ECOCA.
What exactly are ACES’s plans for the newly acquired property at 388 Orange St.? And what exactly did Danehy mean by “developmental enhancements” in his original comment about the site?
“Developmental enhancements would be programmatic space changes,” Danehy replied. “We are leasing the property back to the law firm through August 5, 2023.
Paul Bass file photo
Previous owner Len Fasano: Digital shift, high taxes led him to sell.
The building’s now-former owner, Len Fasano, told the Independent in a recent phone interview that two main factors led him to sell the Orange Street office building: a digital shift in the state’s court system that made it less important to be physically right next door to New Haven’s downtown court buildings, and rising local property taxes in New Haven.
“As far as we were concerned, with the advent of electronic filing for the court,” and with the pandemic-induced partial shift to Zoom and online court hearings, he said, “the ability to be in New Haven is not as prominent” as it once was for general practice law firms like his.
Fasano, a former Republican state senator from North Haven who previously served as minority leader and as Republican president pro tem of the state legislature’s upper chamber, also blamed financial pressures coming from City Hall for his law firm’s pending move to a building it owns in East Haven.
“Taxes keep going up in New Haven at incredible rates,” he said, even though New Haven recently received a $50 million annual bump in state aid through the Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) program.
According to the city’s online tax bill database, Fasano’s local property tax bill for 388 Orange St. actually went down, not up, by several hundred dollars thanks to the latest city budget’s mill rate and revaluation phase in.
The property’s local tax bill last fiscal year, FY2022, was $21,172.54. This fiscal year, FY2023, it’s $20,795.02.
The property’s tax bill has increased over the preceding four years, however. In FY21, the property’s tax bill was $21,172.54. FY20’s tax bill was $20,738.28. FY19’s tax bill was $20,738.28. And FY18’s tax bill was $18,663.50.
Fasano praised ACES as the “perfect” organization to take over 388 Orange St., given that it already owns the ECA school right next door, the Little Theatre around the block on Lincoln Street, and given that they “understand the neighborhood” and respect the neighborhood’s architecture.