This story was published in the June 29, 1989, edition of the Lewiston Tribune.
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MOSCOW — The Moscow School District would like to purchase the struggling Moscow Mall and convert it into school buildings.
However, the mall’s owners in Illinois are not willing to sell, Superintendent Charles L. Sutton told the school board Tuesday night.
The mall’s mortgage is held by Harold Carlson and Associates of Rosemont, Ill. The firm’s director of retail services, Robert Swanson, confirmed Wednesday that he had been contacted by a Moscow lawyer about the sale, but he said the company wants to keep the mall as a retail operation.
Swanson said the firm has no immediate plans to sell the mall. The property has an assessed value of about $2.8 million, according to the Latah County Assessor’s Office.
Neither Swanson nor Moscow School Board chairman Suzanne Scripter were willing to name the lawyer who approached the Illinois firm.
The board still is faced with devising a building plan to ease crowding in the schools.
On Tuesday, trustees said they will choose one of two plans between now and their July 25 meeting. When they formally adopt a plan, they will set an amount for a bond issue to pay for the project. The bond election will be held Oct. 24.
The two options now being considered carry price tags of $5.8 million and $6.9 million.
The $6.9 million plan would put a new 13-room elementary school on district property near the current junior nigh building. The less-expensive plan would add six general-purpose classrooms at McDonald School, while adding a new computer room and library at Lena Whitmore School.
Both plans call for about $1.3 million in renovation at the junior high, $100,000 worth of repairs at the fieldhouse and around $2 million in additions to the high school which includes adding another six-classroom story to the high school annex.
Trustees Scripter, Robert Dwelle and Robert Becker favored the $5.8 million plan at Tuesday’s meeting. Trustee John Bennett said he could support either proposal, and recently re-elected board member Frank Seaman repeated his call for relieving overcrowding at the elementary schools above all else.
Scripter said buying the mall would have given the district a viable third option as it struggles to develop a building plan to ease overcrowding in the Moscow schools.
”It would have solved a lot of needs,” she said. ”It was too good to be true.”
The district was interested in buying “whatever they were willing to sell,” Scripter said. School officials asked the lawyer to look into the deal after hearing a rumor about two months ago that “everything would be available except Safeway, Pizza Hut and the bank (First National Bank of North Idaho),” Scripter said.
