New police station, town hall envisioned for Orange Drive property
Elon’s town council has instructed the town’s staff to offer $3 million to the Laboratory Corporation of America for property at 112 Orange Drive that its members had previously identified as a potential new home for the town’s police department and municipal building.
The council voted 4-to-0 to extend this offer to LabCorp after a brief closed session that fell near the end of an excruciating, five-hour meeting on Monday.
This 15-minute powwow was merely the latest of several confidential conclaves that the council has held since its members first went behind closed doors in March to discuss the potential acquisition of LabCorp’s property. Under North Carolina’s Open Meeting’s Law, public bodies like Elon’s town council are permitted to go behind closed doors to consider potential property purchases. This exemption to the law’s general mandate for Openness nevertheless requires the public body to disclose the location and owner of the real estate up for discussion as well as the proposed public purpose the purchase would serve.
According to Elon’s town manager Richard Roedner, the council’s purchase offer applies not only to the 5.8 acres that LabCorp owns at 112 Orange Drive but also to a 56,000-square-foot building that he said the town will probably repurpose if this real estate transaction goes through. This 59-year-old building and its grounds currently have an assessed tax value of $1,852,803 – or about $1.1 million less than the council has agreed to offer LabCorp for the property.
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Located at the corner of Orange Drive and Williamson Avenue, this property is situated less than a half mile from the current site of Elon’s town hall and police station, which occupy a one-story building at the juncture of Williamson and Trollinger avenues. With less than 7,000 square feet of floor space, this building has long been deemed insufficient by the town’s municipal leaders, who’ve entertained several other options for increasing their available space, including a three-story complex on the site of the current municipal building.
Roeder has told The Alamance News that it isn’t entirely clear what the town would do with this existing building if LabCorp accepts the municipality’s offer.
“That hasn’t been decided at this point,” the town manager told the newspaper on Tuesday. “We have options for whether we lease it or sell it or develop it for some other use.”
Although the council held its initial closed session about LabCorp’s Orange Drive property in March, the town seems to have been eyeing this company’s real estate holdings for a much longer period of time.
In response to a public records request from The Alamance News, Roedner recently provided a non-disclosure agreement that the town inked in the summer of 2023 as a prelude to any negotiations with LabCorp about the potential acquisition of the company’s property.
Monday’s 4-to-0 decision to extend the $3 million purchase offer excluded councilmember Stephanie Bourland, who had previously informed her colleagues that she’d be absent from that evening’s meeting.
