York Town News
York Redemption Center closes doors
Property owners deny tenant's claim that he was evicted
By Virginia L. Woodwell
York Redemption Center owner Clarence "Skip" Brunet stands outside his now-closed business on Monday, July 17.
Photo by Virginia L. Woodwell
YORK - Visitors to the York Redemption Center on Woodbridge Road this week found this sign on the door: "Effective July 14 we have closed our door forever. Sorry."
Standing amid the last of the cans and bottles on which he's been doling out deposit redemptions for the last nine years, center owner Clarence "Skip" Brunet said Monday he was closing down because he'd been evicted.
Brunet said that the owner of the property, Annette Fazio, acting through a manager, her nephew Andy Fazio, was refusing to rent to him any longer because Brunet was refusing to continue to redeem the restaurant's cans and bottles.
Fazio's son Brian Bair, however, who manages the restaurant with Andy Fazio, takes sharp issue with almost all of Brunet's contentions.
Pointing to a small green shed next to his main facility that had been designated a deposit spot for Fazio's containers, Brunet said that he'd stopped serving the restaurant because restaurant staff had thrown their containers in there haphazardly, costing him time and money.
Brunet also said the owners were upset with him over his redemption payments to them. Because individual payments were small, he said, he'd let them accumulate over time, to the point where he owed Fazio's between $200 and $300. That debt, however, he said he'd paid.
In a telephone interview on Monday, Bair said that Brunet's redemption debt to Fazio's has accumulated over the course of nine months, and that, counting only containers for beer and wine, it came to a little over $1,200, and to $1,500 counting liquor bottles.
Bair said Brunet has paid the restaurant $300 of that debt, but he stated the total still owed is "much, much more than that," and said that the restaurant could readily substantiate its claim.
"We have records," he stressed.
When Brunet was asked for the money, Bair said, "He got furious," showing no inclination to negotiate.
"We never asked him to move out," Bair said, contending that the decision to fold the business was Brunet's alone.
"This is not an eviction," he insisted. "… He moved out because he owes us money."
Brunet stated that when he consulted a lawyer about objecting to what he perceives as an eviction, he was told that he had no recourse because no lease was involved. There was no lease between the two parties, merely a tenant-at-will arrangement.
Bair reported that Brunet was current on his rent but that that rent was "very, very low," and included utilities.
Brunet, Bair claimed, "took advantage of my mother. … She is a very sweet person," he said, "and she didn't want to raise the rent."
In speaking to the eviction issue, Bair contended that, in losing Brunet, the restaurant is losing both a tenant and a redemption center useful to itself - a situation, he said, that makes no sense as a goal.
He also acknowledged, "He has every right not to service us."
Bair reported that Fazio's would be redeeming their cans and bottles through arrangements with their suppliers.
Annette Fazio has been owner of the three-building complex, which she purchased from York resident Rick Hart in 2002. Prior to that time, both Fazio and Brunet rented from Hart, who is also Brunet's brother-in-law.
Brunet said that he had no other site in mind for his redemption center, though he said that he'd been searching for one for over two years.
"I've looked everywhere - in Ogunquit, Wells - and found nothing," Brunet said. "And if there is property available, they want too much money for it."
He alleged he learned at that time that Fazio "wants to tear these buildings down and plans to put up an office building."
Bair, however, said that his mother and staff have no immediate plans for the complex.
"The bulldozers are not lined up," he said, and any plans in the works he described as still-amorphous "ideas and visions about how to make the property more profitable."
Brunet saw a problem for the community in the closing of his center. He was processing an average of 30,000 containers a day, he said, with six distributors coming for pickups once, and sometimes twice, a week. He forecast that, with Hannaford's remaining as the only redemption center in town - and one, he said, that was already glutted - the town's recycling system would end up picking up the slack as well as the cost.
A call to the Kittery redemption center known as The Thirsty Dawg, however, located at 220 State Road (on the northbound side of Route1 immediately north of the Kittery traffic circle at the point where it blends briefly with I-95) revealed that center as another local option.
According to owner Cameron Paine, his 11-year-old facility redeems containers of all kinds, from individuals as well as companies, is open from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. from Tuesday through Saturday, and is "two times bigger" than the York Redemption Center.
Brunet occupied roughly 2,300 square feet in the Woodbridge Road complex, in a facility that was a first commercial bakery site for When Pigs Fly Sourdough Breads, and the interior room configuration, he said, hasn't changed since that time.
"I want to thank the people who've supported me here for nine years," Brunet said. "We're sorry that this is happening like this, but there's nothing we can do."
