Atlantic Union College, closed last year, is selling off parts of campus in Lancaster

LANCASTER – A year after closing, Atlantic Union College has begun selling off parts of its old campus.

According to a recent post on the website of the Atlantic Union Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which oversaw the college, the conference's plan is to sell all but the Thayer Mansion and buildings on campus used by the new Adventist Heritage Center.

State land records show the former college already sold a property at 40 Maple St. for $610,000 to Villani Real Estate LLC last week. The property is an office building behind the main campus buildings.

The dissolution of Atlantic Union’s campus comes on the heels of its official closing as an educational institution. According to the Atlantic Union Conference’s update, the state Department of Higher Education revoked the college’s charter on March 5, effectively terminating its ability to operate as a school.

Atlantic Union announced its decision to close in February 2018, citing existing and projected financial struggles as the college’s main backers – the regional branches of the Seventh-day Adventist Church – began pulling or threatening to pull their subsidies to the school.

The college began winding down its academic programs around this time last year, officially wrapping up in August.

According to the Atlantic Union Conference, church leaders in May 2018 were still trying to salvage the college; at that month’s constituency meeting, delegates "voted to try to avoid selling the core campus buildings," and to "continue to find ways to bring back Adventist higher education on the campus."

But by this May, officials apparently had become resigned to the college’s demise, with the conference’s recent post indicating efforts to find some alternative use for the 135-acre campus were unsuccessful.

The report also reveals the conference is still paying $1.2 million annually to maintain the campus, and that its current $520,000 yearly tax bill is slated to increase next year, when the expiration of its tax-exempt status becomes factored in.

That fiscal situation is one of the reasons the conference agreed to sell off a large portion of the former college’s land, the conference’s update reported. Proceeds from the sales will be used to pay off old loans - the college has about $2.4 million in loan debt – and help cover operating expense, and support other educational programs within the church.

In an attempt to preserve historic artifacts on campus, conference leaders collaborated with the Adventist Heritage Ministries of the General Conference to form the Adventist Heritage Center, which will take on that task. The Thayer Mansion, which dates to 1846, will continue to be leased out as a music school and used as an outreach ministry.

Several other buildings are also being rented out to generate revenue, but the conference’s report noted many of those structures are in need of costly repairs.

Lancaster Town Administrator Orlando Pacheco said one of the main challenges with selling the former college properties is not only the age of the buildings, but also that many of them were built to outdated codes and are connected to the campus’s own power grid, which likely will become abandoned.

Michael Antonellis, the town planning director, pointed out that the campus is zoned residential.

"Its options are limited to some sort of residential use, or some sort of institutional use, such as a college," Antonellis said.

Both Pacheco and Antonellis said Lancaster has had no active discussions with church leadership about the fate of the campus, although Pacheco said the conference has kept various town department personnel apprised of pieces of its planning.

Pacheco also acknowledged the town isn’t privy to what sort of opportunity exists on the campus.

"We’re not too familiar with the assets or the status of those assets," Pacheco said, although he added there could be some buildings or parts of the property the town might be interested in. "Obviously we’d like to see some properties (there) come back on the tax rolls. That would be beneficial," adding that building affordable housing on the site would also be an outcome the town might like. "There are definitely a lot of challenges there … but we’re not going to dictate to a private entity how it should handle its assets."