Maitland downtown development project gets new life

Why did the developer cross the road?

To try and get his proposed parking garage project approved by the Maitland City Council.

Developer Scott Ryan proposed a simple – on paper – solution to make his previously rejected proposal to put a parking garage in downtown Maitland a reality: pick it up and move it across the street.

Two weeks after Ryan watched his dreams of putting a retail-fronted parking garage on Maitland’s old city hall city get dashed by a 4-1 vote by the City Council, he was back front-and-center in the Council Chambers on Jan. 26 proposing a Hail Mary pass to get the project through. The citizens who opposed his original project could keep the old city hall site as parkland like they wanted, he said, and he’d put the garage on the land across Horatio Avenue on a city-owned empty parking lot instead.

“Everybody liked our project,” Ryan said. “They just didn’t like where it was at.” So, he said, his solution is to build a substantially similar project on the other side of the street.

The City Council voted unanimously in favor of city staff continuing talks to explore Ryan’s new proposal, which would restructure the parking garage to also be home to a specialty grocer – Earth Fare – on the first floor.

The fate of this project – much like Ryan’s previous one – depends on the city’s desire to sell or trade the land he hopes to build on. His plans for the old city hall site fell through earlier this month when the city decided they didn’t want to sell that land. But this time, local property advisor Bob Beaumont said, there’s a bigger benefit for the city to go along with the sale.

Beaumont, who was originally hired by the city for a property appraisal and is now working independently to help seal a deal for downtown Maitland, is working with several property owners who own land in the blocks stretching from U.S. Highway 17-92 to Maitland Avenue and Horatio Avenue to George Avenue to reach a mutually beneficial deal to get dirt moving downtown.

Beaumont is proposing that the city appropriate $1.45 million from its capital improvements fund to purchase a tract of the privately owned property located where Independence Lane dead-ends into Horatio Avenue. That land, he said, can then be used by the city to extend the Independence Lane right-of-way through the property northward ending at George Avenue. Extending Independence Lane is a goal expressed by the city in its Downtown Maitland Revitalization Plan, and would allow for more developable street-frontage parcels in the downtown district.

In concert with that sale, Beaumont is trying to broker the deal for the city to sell or trade its land parallel to the proposed road – currently an unused parking lot – to Scott Ryan’s development team, Urban Redevelopment Concepts, to allow his parking garage plans to become a reality.

“We’re trying to offer solutions for what the city’s vision is,” Ryan said.

The Council voted unanimously to continue working with Beaumont to further explore both the possibilities of selling or trading the city land, and buying the property to extend Independence Lane. The Council recommended that Ryan and Beaumont provide updates on the progress of their plans and projects at each upcoming City Council meeting, the next of which is Feb. 9.