Businessman Buys Camp Holy Cross from Roman Catholic Diocese for $4m, Plans to Build Houses

Burlington Free Press
February 6, 2012

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20120206/NEWS01/120206019/Businessman-buys-Camp-Holy-Cross-from-Roman-Catholic-diocese-4M-plans-build-houses?odyssey=nav|head

The saga of who will buy Camp Holy Cross, a much-prized piece of Malletts Bay lakeshore real estate owned for decades by the state’s Roman Catholic diocese, is over.

Bruce Barry, who lives near the property in Colchester and owns Barry’s Transmission Specialists in South Burlington, said Monday he has purchased the 26-acre parcel and nearly 1,000 feet of shoreline for $4 million.

First step: Demolition. Barry said he plans to have all of Camp Holy Cross’ 22 buildings demolished because they are in poor, unusable condition.

“We’re going to start by taking down the fallen-down buildings and cleaning the property up and possibly designing a sea wall to stop the erosion there,” Barry said. “In the future, I would say we’ll probably put up some really nice houses along the lakefront or something like that.”

Barry said he has no timetable for when that development might start.

He said he has been interested in buying the property for some time, but delayed pursuing a purchase when the town of Colchester began negotiations to buy the land for $4.5 million last year and convert it to public use. Voters in Colchester rejected the proposal by a 2-1 ratio in October.

“I was able to buy it before the town was ever able to,” he said. “I just didn’t want to buy it out from under the town ... so I let them go ahead and go through their process. When it fell apart, I’m like, ‘Well, I guess I could do that.’”

The purchase was finalized Jan. 23, according to the Colchester Town Assessor’s Office.

The diocese, in a statement issued Monday, referred to the failed effort by Colchester to purchase the site but did not discuss its decision to sell the land to Barry.

“The Diocese of Burlington offered the Town of Colchester the possibility to make use of the Camp Holy Cross property for the common good of the community,” read the statement from the Rev. Daniel White, a diocesan spokesman. “Rightfully, this proposal was brought to the residents of Colchester to express their preference through a referendum vote.”

“The residents, by a vote of two to one, decided it was not feasible to purchase this property,” the statement continued. “The Diocese respected and accepted this decision and the property was placed back on the real estate market. It recently has been purchased by a private individual.”

The diocese had owned the property for 66 years and used it for years as a summer camp for boys. Camp Holy Cross merged with Camp Tara, a nearby girls’ camp, in 2004. The Camp Tara property later was sold for $2.2 million.

Camp Holy Cross-Tara was closed in 2008. In 2010, the diocese announced plans to sell Camp Holy Cross to help raise the $17.6 million it needed to finance a “global settlement” it had reached with 26 victims of priest sexual abuse.

The disclosure of the camp’s sale came one day after the Burlington Free Press reported that church lawyers had asked a judge to throw out a pending lawsuit from an alleged victim of long-ago priest sexual abuse, arguing that any more big damage verdicts in such cases could force it to go out of business and thus be an infringement on religious freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

White, speaking with a Free Press reporter by telephone Monday, said the Sunday article was hurtful to the Catholic faithful because it did not reflect what a diocese is about and appeared on a day when many Catholics go to Mass.

“Articles like yesterday’s do cause great angst among some very good people who just want to live very good and simple lives,” White said. “You make that very difficult for them.”

Contact Sam Hemingway at 660-1850 or shemingway@burlingtonfreepress.com . Follow Sam on Twitter at www.twitter.com/SamuelHemingway.