A preservation organization has some ideas for what to do with Richwood’s Opera House dilemma.
At the regular council meeting on Monday, visitors from Preservation Ohio proposed their thoughts on the revitalization project, which hit a standstill over how to proceed in recent months.
Thomas Palmer, Executive Director of Preservation Ohio, spoke at the meeting to offer Preservation Ohio’s resources toward the Opera House for a path toward its preservation.
“If you are considering a path for the Opera House that is consistent with its preservation, we’d love to be able to work with you to put you in touch with some resources,” Palmer said.
Preservation Ohio is a non-profit organization focused on advocacy for Ohio’s many historic buildings, according to its website.
Palmer said the main reason for attending the meeting was to provide Preservation Ohio’s online resource free of charge, so that Richwood may decide which options suit them best moving forward.
“We have experience both personally and as an organization with many communities around Ohio that have been down the same path you’re taking,” Palmer said.
Palmer discussed some of these options while giving examples of communities who have gone down similar paths. One of the options he gave is to transfer the project to a non-profit or profit corporation.
Palmer said Preservation Ohio took possession of a seven-story hotel building in Hamilton and marketed it to a preservation developer.
“And what can happen is you can put restrictive covenants on the building, requiring the new owners to do things in a way that’s conducive with what you would like to have done,” Palmer said.
In Troy, the former Miami County Courthouse building is currently being rescued, Palmer said.
“And they are going to do the same thing we’re talking about,” Palmer said. “They’re going to get it to a preservation friendly entity and then put these covenants on it so they can make sure whoever acquires the building will actually follow through with it.”
Palmer said that if you get the building in the hands of a non-profit or for-profit organization, you can involve federal and state tax credits and other financial incentives.
“Ohio Historic Preservation tax credit has had 31 rounds of funding, there have been 673 projects rehabilitating more than 917 historic buildings in 91 communities across Ohio,” Palmer said.
Other than laying out options for Richwood, Palmer said their resource center they are providing to Richwood has a list of projects all over Ohio and where they got their funding.
Council President Reddy Brown responded positively to Palmer’s ideas.
“We’d love to have that situation work. Someone that wants it (and) has a great use for it. We can use the legalities that you mentioned to protect it and then the building becomes beautiful and we get that asset to the village,” Brown said.
Brown also discussed some of the things he has been working on regarding the Opera House.
He said there is a $150,000 capital grant that is time sensitive that was meant to replace the lost truss, which was tabled back in December.
He said that money could potentially be re-purposed to save the clock tower but not the rest of the building.
“Part of that conversation with the state was if we did that with that $150,000 they would attempt to get us another $100,000 in the 2026 bi-annual capital bill that would be for the demolition of the main Opera House,” Brown said.
Brown said another option is to use those funds to fix the truss and use it for some of the ideas Palmer brought up.
“With the understanding that maybe there’s some of that funding out there that we just didn’t know about,” Brown said.
Council is going to ask for an extension of that $150,000 grant, but has not committed to any of the options discussed at the meeting.