SARANAC LAKE – The owners of Sears are putting their building, their parking lot and their business up for sale.

Larry Mullen and Phil Vivlamore, who were embroiled in a fight with the village over their parking lot this year, listed the lot and their building for sale Monday with Adirondack Premier Properties in Lake Placid. Their asking price for the 1.41-acre property is $819,000.

Margie Philo, owner/broker of Adirondack Premier Properties, said the Sears business is also up for sale, though it hadn’t been listed as of Monday. The building that houses Sears is also home to Nori’s Village Market, Edward Jones Investments and an art gallery.

Vivlamore and Mullen decided put the property on the market, Philo said, because of the harsh reception they received from some people in the community during the parking lot controversy.

“They don’t feel they’re being welcomed in town and they feel it’s time for them to leave,” she said. “The owners have been vilified and it’s really unfortunate.”

The decision to sell comes just 16 months after Vivlamore and Mullen bought the property.

But a lot has happened in that short time period. The Sears’ owners became embroiled in a very public dispute with the village over the busy downtown parking lot, which the village had leased for decades and maintained for public parking.

Vivlamore and Mullen wanted to sell the parking lot to the village, and the village wanted to buy it, but the two couldn’t agree on a price and the village’s most recent lease expired June 1. The Saranac Lake Area Chamber of Commerce stepped in, offered to lease the lot and planned to charge people for parking. But the chamber backed out of the deal three weeks later.

In July, the village offered to buy the property at a price determined by a “mutually-acceptable commercial appraiser,” provided it didn’t exceed $265,000. Vivlamore and Mullen made a counter-offer and, at that point, it seemed like a deal was close.

But negotiations broke down again, and on the morning of Aug. 12, Vivlamore and Mullen made due on their threats to make the lot private. They blocked off half of the roughly 110 parking spaces with concrete barriers and posted large signs that read “Private Parking for Sears, Nori’s and Edward Jones only.”

During the dispute, local residents voiced their frustration in letters to the editor and online comments on the Enterprise website. Some people blamed the village, but much of the angst was targeted at the Sears owners.

“There was a movement suggested, by I don’t know who, to boycott their business,” Philo said. “I don’t know how much they’re off, if at all, but that can’t help business. They just really feel unwelcomed.”

Philo said she hopes a new buyer can appeal to village officials and “mend fences.” She said she has an interested buyer whom she described as a “prominent business person in town,” although she didn’t know whether that person wants to keep the parking lot private or reopen negotiations with the village.

“If the village wanted to approach me and open up the negotiations again to subdivide and buy the lot, I’m very happy to speak with them,” Philo said. “But I don’t see why any owner would open up that lot to the public without some compensation. They’re taking risk. They have some liability.”

Philo said Vivlamore and Mullen were not willing to comment on their decision sell the property.

“If they want to sell it, I wish them the best of luck,” village Mayor Clyde Rabideau said Monday. “We’ve always said we would buy the parking lot segment at fair market value. By law, we can’t pay any more.”

Rabideau said he thinks it would be in the village’s long-term interest to acquire the parking lot.

“I’d love to see Sears resurrected and I’d love to see community access and/or ownership to the parking lot,” he said. “Our door is open to anyone who owns the property, whether it’s the current or future owners.”

Rabideau said he never called for a boycott of Sears during the dispute, although he told the Enterprise at one point that Vivlamore and Mullen “would engender a tremendously negative reaction from the community that would have an adverse impact upon their business” if they made the lot private.

“The word on the street was ‘Don’t shop at Sears,’ but I can’t recall saying ‘Don’t go to Sears,'” Rabideau said. “It’s not my nature to do that. Everybody’s in business.”

If the building is sold, Nori’s Village Market co-owner Andy Keal said he hopes the new owner allows Nori’s to stay, irons things out with the village and reopens the parking lot for the general public.

“Based on all of the reactions that people have had in Saranac Lake about the parking lot issue, I would say it’s a good thing that this could potentially help get that resolved,” he said.

If the village wants to improve the parking situation, Keal said it needs to enforce the two-hour parking limit downtown year round.

After the Sears listing was published online Monday, Philo said she had five phone calls from people interested in the property and scheduled two site visits.

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Contact Chris Knight at 891-2600 ext. 24 or cknight@adirondackdailyenterprise.com.