First off, this has been suggested before and the chances of this happening are slim. But, seeing as suggestions like this once did force some changes to happen, I'll continue my response.
Original town ownership has and always been a special thing. It is complete power to do whatever the hell you want to your town. It shouldn't be easy to lose such privileges.
Unoriginal towns always were a questionable method of ownership. You got to buy them a lot cheaper, but you also signed away certain privileges, such as applying for a warp. Personally, I don't like the concept of unoriginal towns. They make getting towns so easy very early. A resident looking/living in a town is not as common nowadays. They buy themselves an unoriginal town, spend time on it, and often end up selling their mayor town in exchange for the rank, thus creating another unoriginal town and still not having any original owner privileges. Sure, some buy unoriginal towns for massive projects, but those often go along with original ones for town features.
Onto your suggestion, seeing as there is already a way to get original ownership of a town, I doubt this suggestion will suddenly make everything easier/cheaper. Sure it's very expensive, but I've known players return from years of inactivity only to find that the comayors sold away their town or the town has been claimed. Now while town claims cost money, becoming comayor is a lot easier. You wouldnt want t find that not only you lost your town, but it also completely changed? I assume you mean not only warps (those might be pleasant to he once/if you get the town back), so what about PvP arenas, town flags, town-town portal to somebody else's town? You'd have to pay to get rid of them.
Now let's be think about the purchaser, you do, after all, cheat the system by getting a cheaper town. Yet, you also expect it to be the same as an original one? Eh... If you really like that town, you pay back for cheating the system by spending more money than you originally would. Then you're even. But else, you should know that it was always a risk.
However, you, personally, have a special case. You had a portal applied for, but it didn't transition into a /warp, since that required an application on a thread. So, I'm not exactly sure what would be fair in your scenario.
But, for the above reasons to cherish original ownership and unoriginal towns being a bad thing, I will -1 this suggestion.
Good luck with your town.

 

-1 Don't go inactive.

 

Ahh yes, @BarbaricBuffalo should have completely ignored his real life opportunities that no doubt would affect him for the rest of his life so that he could have a chance at having a slight convenience in a virtual minecraft server.

Further; if you'd actually read what he said instead of having the knee-jerk reaction of "all hell naw"; one that was probably instilled in you from skimming over other suggestions like this you'd realise that the original owner of the town in question had quit the server well before Barbaric had even A) joined the server. B) bought the town. And C) left the server himself.

 

Town claim

That would remove the need for things such as claims, town transfers, etc.

 

Back in the day, I talked a lot to Phys about original ownership and whether there were any changes that we could make to it to improve it. It isn't a perfect system, but it does work. Towns have always 'sacred' for want of a better word - when you start out on ECC, you aspire to your first town, you use them going forward to show off your wealth/Impressive buildings - and that needs to be respected.

There were also 2 other related points that I kept coming back to. ECC is based on the idea of original ownership being, for minimal activity, permanent. As much as you need to make the game fun for current active players, you also need to protect older, less active players. So many of inactive players return to ECC and become very significant members of the community. Think how many players disappear, return, take breaks etc. If any of those return and all of their towns have been lost or destroyed, they don't return. Of course there is a balance to be met, but town claims do that well already.

tl;dr - Not a perfect system, but it works as it is. If you could re-design ECC from Day-1, I may not choose the same system. But it is what we have now.

 

I can see the point of having a rule to disallow town feature requests which aren't made by the original owner, but I have always felt it was a bit cruel cause some people don't know everything to cover their own butts and will always run into situation where they get messed over because they are lacking something they need. I don't think they should do away with the whole original owner thing, but it would be nice that if after a certain amount of time, the whole original owner thing expires. Will most likely never happen tho. :/

I wish this was still a thing:
https://www.ecocitycraft.com/forum/threads/portal-to-warp-exchanges.134827/
Never understood why it was only for 30 days... might be a better route for you @BarbaricBuffalo, trying to get them to exchange your portal for a warp than have them remove the whole being original owner thing. ;)