By CRAIG FREILICH

POTSDAM – Clarkson University has purchased a fourth parcel of land along Maple Street, U.S. Rt. 11, that they would like annexed into the village to go with three parcels added early in November.

The parcel, once an auto repair and sales business at 152 Maple St. run by James Engels, is expected to be annexed to the village, as were the previous three parcels purchased from Frederick “Hank” Robar and added to the village in November.

The latest parcel, bought by the university for $150,000 in November, will take a “strange boundary there now and square it off on Clarkson property” at the northwest corner of the campus, said the university’s Chief Financial Officer James Fish.

With that, the university will clear and landscape the property to complete its effort to improve the look of the campus by travelers coming into Potsdam from the southeast.

The main reason the university bought the properties was “to beautify the campus,” Fish said when discussing the Robar purchases. “That was truly our motivation. It is not a pretty picture as people enter the village on Rt. 11.

“The opportunity presented itself and we took it,” he said.

The other advantage to the university of the annexation will be the availability of village water and sewer service for those parcels. The work by the university to extend those lines has begun and has benefitted from the stretch of unseasonably warm weather, Fish said. This latest parcel is near the athletic fields to the south and a planned automated greenhouse, a business startup called Agbotics.

The greenhouse is a joint project between the university and Agbotic, a company with Clarkson alumni ties, to work on the concept of robots tending to plants in the controlled environment the greenhouse will provide as “a kind of living lab” for students, faculty and the company, Fish said.

That project has just been awarded $2 million in the latest round of competitive state economic development grants, announced Thursday.

The annexed property will be “tax exempt to the extent Clarkson uses it for its educational mission,” said Fish, thus removing the latest parcel from the Town of Potsdam’s tax rolls and not adding to the village’s tax rolls unless commercial development occurs there.

But once the Agbotics project, a commercial enterprise to be run in conjunction with the university, leases the land to build and run the greenhouse, Fish said he will “notify the assessor and prepare to pay” an appropriate amount of property tax for that spot.

The greenhouse construction is expected to be completed in 2016, although no firm schedule has been set, Fish said.

Clarkson has previously announced a part of the plan could be to move the university’s maintenance equipment facility from near Walker Arena, on Clarkson Avenue, to the newly acquired land.

Fish said the university had no plan to make an offer on another plot owned by Hank Robar across Maple Street from the campus that now contains one of Robar’s famous – or infamous – “toilet garden” protests of village zoning policy.