The Forbes property, one of the longest-running vacancies in Chelsea, has been sold to Mass Audubon for $8.36 million, and the city is getting more than $1 million back in unpaid taxes and liens. City Manager Fidel Maltez reported the sale to the council on April 1, answering an order Councillor Leo Robinson had filed asking what was happening with the site.
“We can report that the receiver has officially sold the property to Mass Audubon for $8.36 Million,” Maltez wrote. “As part of the City will receive over $1 Million in back taxes and property liens. The City will also receive all costs appropriated by the City Council for the receivership.”
What was sold
The site carries the name of the Forbes Lithograph Manufacturing Company, which printed there for decades and was once among the largest employers in the city. The property went into receivership, the legal process by which a court appoints someone to take control of a distressed property and either fix or sell it. The council had been appropriating money to fund that receivership, and the letter says the city is being repaid those costs out of the sale.
The buyer is the state’s largest conservation nonprofit. Maltez told the council that a document showing “the vision of Mass Audubon” had been submitted to the receiver and was part of the public record, and attached it. The attachment did not survive the scan in the council’s own packet, which means the only description of what Mass Audubon intends to do with the land is, for the moment, not readable in the city’s file.
Why it matters to the money
A city recovering over $1 million in back taxes on a single parcel is not a small event in a year when Chelsea’s free cash is falling from $32.4 million toward roughly $5 million. It is also a reminder of what a long vacancy costs. Whatever the years of unpaid taxes totaled, the city collected none of it while the property sat, and got a fraction of it at the end through a court process it had to pay for.
The conservation outcome raises a question worth asking, and it is not a criticism of Mass Audubon. What a charitable owner pays in property tax depends on how the land is used and on exemptions the assessors apply, and the city has not said publicly what it expects the parcel to yield going forward. A site that returns over $1 million once is a different thing from a site that returns money every year. In a city whose own five-year forecast shows deficits beginning in 2028 and reaching $18.6 million by 2031, and whose City Manager is asking the council to create a Chief Economic Development Officer to grow the tax base, the long-term tax treatment of an $8.36 million parcel is worth stating out loud.
What we still do not know
Mass Audubon’s plan for the site and its timeline are not in the record we can read. Neither is the exact amount of back taxes, the receivership costs being reimbursed, or how the sale price compares with the last assessed value. Robinson’s order asked for an update and got four sentences. A fuller accounting would be a reasonable thing for the council to request before the fiscal year closes.