Instead of building a fourth high school, the Dublin school district will spend $9.4 million to buy the former Verizon office building on Emerald Parkway and convert it.

Last spring, the district announced that unless the two parties could reach an agreement on the price, it would use eminent domain to force the building's owners to sell. Dublin was offering $7.4 million to Denver-based Emerald Parkway Valley Equity Group, and Valley Equity was asking for $12.4 million, which was what one appraiser said it was worth.

The district and the company recently settled in the middle, at $9.4 million. The Dublin Board of Education approved the purchase on Monday night.

Remodeling is to begin this summer, floor by floor, at an estimated additional cost of between $9 million and $10 million. The first students might be inside as soon as this fall, the district said.

Nontraditional programming focused on career exploration will be housed in the building, but the specifics are to be determined.

"We did not want to put the community through the financial and emotional pain of building a fourth high school," said board President Lynn May in a statement, "and with the acquisition of the former Verizon building, we will now be able to avoid those costs."

The 15,600-student district is growing, with an additional 3,000 students estimated within a decade. But instead of buying up to 90 acres and then spending $70 million to $95 million to build a fourth high school, district officials decided they should look for existing commercial space in Dublin.

The vacant, 118,000-square-foot Verizon building at 5175 Emerald Parkway is across from Dublin Coffman High School and only a few minutes' drive from the two other high schools.

The school district's anonymous $6.9 million bid on the building in a distressed-property sale was rejected. Instead, the building was sold to Valley Equity for $5.9 million in early 2016. No one could say for sure why the bank that held the property chose a lower bidder.

This agreement also ends a federal lawsuit by Valley Equity. In November, after neither side had budged for months, Valley Equity sued the school district in U.S. District Court in Columbus. The suit said that the district had driven all of Valley Equity's its prospective tenants away with the eminent-domain threat and had unconstitutionally "deprived and continues to deprive Valley Equity of its property and liberty interests" by failing to act on the threat, one way or the other.

One tenant that pulled out of the deal was Lancaster Colony, the owner of Marzetti Foods.

According to an analysis by the city, a fully leased building would have resulted in $1 million in Dublin income taxes, $500,000 in property taxes and 500 high-paying jobs for the city.

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sgilchrist@dispatch.com

@shangilchrist