Greenfire Development and the City's Office of Economic and Workforce Development are holding an open house to take questions from the public on the developer's proposed downtown development plan and the accompanying public-sector incentives/partnership plan. That plan will go before the City Council the evening of Monday, March 3, according to the latest information we have.
Expect to see a large number of questions coming Thursday night from downtown residents and small business/property owners, some of whom say they had no inkling of the size and scale of the properties that would be built adjacent to or across the street from their homes and parcels. Which is, in and of itself, another asterisk of interest surrounding Greenfire's approach to the project.
After all, appeasing (or at least consulting) your neighbors before proposing new construction is pretty much a given for large local projects. On the one hand, there's a risk in this strategy for Greenfire -- getting through the incentives process, only to get slammed in the entitlement process on the various individual projects, wouldn't exactly be a desirable outcome.
On the flip side, would a City Council once-invested in incentives ease up on the brakes when it comes to later project review and approvals?
All of which leaves small downtown stakeholders -- not to mention the well-organized DAP stakeholders -- looking towards this open house, and especially towards Monday night's Council discussion of this item, with a great deal of interest.
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