March 14, 2007

Published in Wake Forest, NC

            “There is tremendous opportunity here. This could be a really wild project on the scaled-down order of North Hills,” Monteith said.

            And like North Hills John Kane, Monteith wants the town’s help in building a parking deck – or decks.

            He is working with Raleigh developer Craig Briner to redevelop the 1970s strip mall and surrounding land. CVS moved from the mall at the beginning of the month, leaving only Maxway as a major tenant, and it is on a month-to-month lease. Dollar General owns its land and store. Briner, acting as East Elm Partners, purchased the mall and 20 acres beginning in 2002 for $2.6 million.

            Monteith said this week he and Briner needed three things to happen to make any project economically viable: Franklin Street had to be built to the N.C. 98 bypass, the bypass had to be completed to Capital Boulevard and “the other important thing was the town hall decision.

            “We accepted the Renaissance Plan as the guideline for downtown,” Monteith said, and it envisioned the new town hall on part of the plaza land with a town green or park where DAB International Inc. does a thriving business selling cars wholesale.

            When the town commissioners chose to place the town hall and a future building on Brooks Street, Briner and Monteith were left with a hole in their plan.

            To compensate for that loss, they are thinking of buying about five acres along South White Street that includes the vacant lot where Marie Joyner’s house stood and the former Holding cotton warehouse next to it. They may also purchase another five acres to the south, giving the project 30 acres in the middle of downtown.

            But, “It raises our cost base,” Monteith said. “We have designed several site plans, but it doesn’t work. We need a better-than-average return to take that kind of risk. We can’t make the numbers work.”

            One solution would be to go up, building at least one four-story building with offices on top, retail beneath. Monteith said. They have been encouraged by a group from the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce who told them that, with enough office space, a computer company could locate its headquarters here.

            “When you go vertical, you have to have more parking,” Monteith said. Even with 30 acres, there is a space problem.

            “A solution would be one or more parking decks. We’ve got to have some sort of public participation or it’s not going to happen.” He pointed out that the town had helped provide parking in the downtown area. (The town set up the Downtown Revitalization Corporation and a district with a 10-cent property tax, which pays off the bonds to buy the land and build the parking lot between South White and Brooks.)

            Monteith says he knows a way for the town to participate without raising the tax rate or impacting the budget. He has broached the idea with some town board members.

            The current plan is for townhouses and apartments with the combination office and retail four-story building. There would also be retail in the current strip mall.

            That strip mall is three concrete-block buildings with smaller shops between. “We are thinking we could take out the dividers and brick up the three buildings and face-lift them,” Monteith said. That would yield 30,000 square feet of retail space, and the former CVS building could be subdivided with some shops facing East Elm Avenue.

            During last week’s economic summit, Monteith talked about his and Briner’s desire to build blocks of townhouses around an interior open space. However, the town is currently urging rear-entrance townhouses with alleys.

            “That means a whole new street system,” Monteith said, “with higher development costs. If you add the other purchases in, then we are in a bind because we can’t make it work with surface-level development. We can’t go vertical without parking decks.”

            Monteith says the town never talked to the DAB owner, Earl Davis, about that site for town hall, but Town Manager Mark Williams and town attorney Eric Vernon refute that.

            Williams said the town had at least two preliminary meetings with Davis and had an appraisal done which was “significantly less” than the asking price.

            “We never got to any hard-core negotiations with them. We left them with the appraisal,” Williams said.

            “Our final decision was based on a lot of things, not just cost,” Williams said. Those factors included where the town already owned property and the ability to develop a town government campus for easy access for town residents, developers and employees.

            “DAB is much more valuable to the town as a retail commercial site,” Williams said. In addition, the proposed area was small. “It gave us no wiggle room to expand in the future.” The Renaissance Plan showed the town hall sitting on the vacant lot at the corner of East Elm Avenue and Brooks Street in front of the now-former CVS drug store. The DAB site was shown as a town commons or green.

            In 2003, soon after he purchased the strip mall, Briner unveiled a very ambitious redevelopment plan to the Wake Forest Chamber of Commerce’s economic development committee which included more than one multi-story building. In the intervening years, Monteith campaigned to establish an early outpost of Wake Technical Community College in the former Winn-Dixie as a stopgap until the school’s northern campus on U.S. 401 opens. Although President Stephan Scott was enthusiastic, the county commissioners were cool and never approved the $2.5 million necessary.