With agreement reached with the last property owners, the preliminaries for construction of a downtown municipal parking lot should be completed by summer’s end, finance director David Davison told selectmen last week.

Davison’s announcement of the successful completion of years of negotiations with property owners came just days before a Boston Globe article explored the question of whether Selectman Alan Rockwood had a conflict of interest in making key votes on the lot. The Rockwood company’s window and renovation business, in a Rockwood-owned building, abuts the proposed parking lot site.

The agreement announced by Davison was reached with owners of the business units within the Cleveland Place condominiums on Main Street. Without naming the building because, he said, he did not want to embarrass the owners, Davison said they dropped a set of conditions they wanted satisfied before they would sell a piece of their common property needed for the 100-space lot.

Davison told the selectmen that if the owners had not come to terms, he would have had to inform the board that the time had come to abandon the parking plan.

This spring, other property owners warned that what they saw as last-minutes demands by Cleveland Place owners could scuttle the parking lot project. But a lawyer handling negotiations for the town indicated more recently that he did not think the condo association actually would press demands that would jeopardize the lot.

After being interviewed by the Globe for the story that appeared Sunday, Rockwood called the State Ethics Commission last week to discuss his situation.

He said he was told by an ethics staffer that the question of whether there was a conflict or a real appearance of a conflict is "interesting."

Rockwood was advised by an ethics staffer, he said, not to participate further as a selectman on parking lot matters until further notice. Rockwood said he will comply with that suggestion, adding that the staffer asked that he contact the commission again within the next few days.

He acknowledged that it was suggested to him, by former Town Administrator James Merriam among others, that he contact the ethics commission well before now.

A section of the state ethics law tells public officials that they should not act on matters involving property abutting theirs.

But, Rockwood said, another section of the law allows officials to act in such situations if the matter before them is of interest to a significant number of townspeople.

Even before he brought up that section, an ethics commission staffer made the point during the phone call that a plan for a downtown municipal parking lot would appear to be of interest to many townspeople, Rockwood said.

"I have always felt very strongly that I have no conflict," he said.

The parking lot is important for the health of downtown, and that makes the matter important to not only business people but to everyone with a stake in the town’s economic vitality, he said.

Downtown has been struggling ever since the creation of the malls, he said. While creation of a parking lot on the west side of Main Street has been discussed for many years, the current plan, thanks to a state grant, is the first to provide a real opportunity to assemble the land needed for the lot, he said.

The Rockwood company does not stand to gain directly from the creation of the lot, he said. The building has more than enough parking to serve his business and the tenants, he noted.

And if the municipal lot plan should fall through, the site will be used for private parking to serve a planned restaurant, he noted. Either way, the property next door will be improved, he said.

The importance to the downtown of making 100 or so parking spaces available to the public should be clear to anyone familiar with the situation, he said. So should the fact that the Rockwood building does not need additional parking, he added. So for an objective observer, there should not be even an appearance of a conflict, he said.

During last week’s phone conversation, a commission staffer said his points sound like good arguments, the selectman said.

The parking lot, to be built in the Main Street, East Street, Glenwood Avenue triangle, is to be paid for through an $895,000 state grant and $50,000 already appropriated by Town Meeting. Of that amount, $273,500 will go to acquire property.

When asked by the Globe why selectmen used the higher of two appraisals for the land, Rockwood could not remember. Since the article appeared Sunday, he said he’s been reminded several times that the higher price reflected the value of the land as components of an assembled parcel, rather than as isolated plots.

Rockwood noted that former selectman Ron Mariani was quoted in the Globe in a way that implied that it was up to the Town of Walpole to decide whether to use the state grant on a downtown parking lot or on something else.

The fact is, Rockwood said, is that the state money is only for a parking lot. "If we gave the money back, we’d be the laughing stock of the Commonwealth," Rockwood said.

Rockwood said Mariani as a selectman raised the possibility of giving the grant back. "I went ballistic," Rockwood said.

Last August, in the single most important decision on the lot, selectmen voted 3-2 to offer the landowners the $273,500 for the property and to use up to $100,000 in a federal brownfields grant to address any pollution on the site.

Selectmen Rockwood, Judith Conroy and William Ryan, still on the board, voted for the offer. Former selectmen Mariani and Joanne Muti voted against it.

At the time, Chairman Ryan noted that the price, include the potential cleanup liability, comes in below the $400,000 appraisal for the parcels as a combined site.

On another vote regarding the parking lot in December, as noted in the Globe, Mariani asked any selectman with a conflict to declare it. No one responded.

Mariani did not mention Rockwood by name. Rockwood’s right to vote was never challenged publicly by a board member.