Complete the sentence with the construction that itself signals a discontinued past state, using the verb in brackets: There ___ (be) a public drinking fountain here, but the council removed it in 2018.

Explication

The prompt requires the construction that itself marks the state as finished, and only used to be encodes that discontinuation directly. The bare past simple states the former existence but leaves the discontinuation to the dated context, and habitual would cannot express a state of existence.