I am going to go ahead and call this meeting of the Merriman County Commissioner's Order.

Today is Tuesday, February 18th.

It is a little after 2 p.m.

We are in room 260 of the City County Building.

And we will begin with introductions.

Good afternoon.

I'm Isla Elders serving as the secretary for the Commissioner's Board and also as the auditor.

Thank you.

And good afternoon.

I am Barbara Lawrence, County Treasurer and a member of the Commissioners.

We've had the call to order.

Next up is approval of the meeting minutes of the December 17th, 2024 meeting.

I second that.

Move and second it.

All in favor say I.

Aye.

Opposed same sound.

Minutes are thereby approved.

We will move on to the not profit program with Indiana Landmarks.

And then we have someone here representing landmarks, and we will hold hopefully pass the resolution for the disclaimer of interest.

Good afternoon, commissioners.

Today we have a request for disclaimer from Indiana Landmarks for parcel 1096461.

This parcel was transferred to Indiana Landmarks at the October 17th, 2013 Commissioners meeting.

At that time, a recommendation was made by staff to include an additional cost of 45,000.

Prior to the terms of the project agreement, Indiana Landmarks is requesting a waiver of that additional payment as well as a disclaimer of interest.

Mark Delossi is here from Indiana Landmarks to provide additional information and answer any questions from the commissioners.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

Thank you for uh having me and for uh hearing our request.

Um, first of all, we have all slept just a little bit since 2013.

So a lot of time has passed, and I thought I would uh address that and address uh some of the key um items that are in the agreement in terms of uh what Indiana landmarks did or has done in the past.

So we were initially approached by folks in the Mapleton Fall Creek neighborhood about this property um at the time uh driving it uh to some extent.

Um Isaiah Cooperstein, who owned a chain of uh in town grocery stores that uh I don't think any longer exist, but had a site immediately north of the temple.

And um then uh Jackie Needis, who at the time was the executive director of the Mapleton Fall Creek Development Corporation, uh, about this vacant building that was a sort of a drag in a primarily residential area.

So could we assist in some way?

So I stepped in and and we started that work.

This building was historically a Jewish synagogue.

It is the oldest extant Jewish synagogue standing in the city of Indianapolis, and so we felt like it was a key historic structure that we wanted to make sure lived on in some form in the future.

At the time, I was initially sort of tipped off about the structure.

It was being uh used by a by this point a Christian congregation that was worshiping in the building, but they were in a dispute with another congregation that was based in Florida.

One said they own the property, one said they had the right to control it because they were worshiping there.

This apparently went on for some time.

Meanwhile, the building started developing holes in the roof, was leaking, etc.

So we really felt like some action needed to be taken.

But by the fall of 2013, somebody, I don't know which of those two parties had not paid taxes on the property, and so it reverted to the county.

That's my understanding, to which we then petition the county um for uh site control so that we could um hopefully improve the property and get it into better hands.

So that's kind of some of that background.

At the time, it just so happened a gentleman that was on our board of directors was Mike Rodman.

So that was great to have that connection with the treasurer's office and and um and with our organization.

So we did indeed agree to the $50,000 payment.

We paid $5,000 up front, which left this $45,000 balance.

In the years in between, just to respond to that point, we did try multiple efforts in terms of what should happen to this property while also meeting the conditions that are outlined in the project agreement under section three, and I'll get back to that in a second.

But just for your benefit, initially what we did was we spent several years at least in terms of forming an entity called Temple Heritage Center Inc.

And we had a whole bunch of stakeholders that were involved with that group from the neighborhood, from around the community, as well as from uh the Jewish community as well.

We wanted them uh represented and around the table.

Interestingly, there were even some Jewish members of Temple Heritage Center Inc.

that had gone to uh worship there when it was still a synagogue.

So it was great to have their uh input and interaction.

So the idea behind forming Temple Heritage Center Inc.

was that it wanted to start a Jewish heritage museum or center in the building, which we thought that's fine.