Allan Appel Photo
LiveWorkLearnPlay’s Reim.
The Development Commission gave its unanimous thumbs up Tuesday to the biggest proposed downtown development in the city’s history and sent it to the Board of Aldermen for final debate later this week.
Architect’s rendering of plan.
The project is the proposed $395 million transformation of the former Coliseum site into a mixed-use and mixed-income neighborhood. Click here for a detailed look at the plan, which envisions some 76,900 square feet of new shops, 785 underground parking spaces, 719 new apartments, a new 160-room hotel and 4.6 acres of office space..
The plan has been evolving for two years. It already has the blessing of the City Plan Commission, other city officials, as well as Hill and downtown neighbors whom the Montreal-based LiveWorkLearnPlay developers led by principal Max Reim (pictured above) have involved in an especially community-centric process.
The plan now moves to the Board of Aldermen for committee hearings on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, followed by a vote by the full Board of Aldermen.
Now get ready for a few acronyms: The “DLDA,” or the development and land disposition, had to come before the Development Commission Tuesday because the submission is “materially” different from the original Downtown Municipal Development Plan (DMDP) adopted in 1996 and then amended in 1998 and 2005.
Specifically, in 2005, the plan called for, among other specifics, the inclusion of a new home for Long Wharf Theater on the Coliseum site.
The theater has since decided instead to remain in Long Wharf’s food district and invest their capital in new stages and seats.
The current plan also has a more diverse and wider range of affordable and workplace housing components, with two and three-bedroom affordable units to attract families. None of that is in the 2005 amendment’s language.
The detailed parking plan laid out eight years ago has also been abandoned for LiveWorkLearnPlay’s underground parking concept.
In the estimate of the city Economic Development Department special counsel John Ward, those changes, among others, amounted to materially altering the DMDP, so that required the Development Commission to have a new look and a vote.
Development Commission Chair Peter Wilkinson (pictured) asked at Tuesday morning’s meeting at City Hall what the “among other” differences are in the current plan from the one as amended in 2005.
Ward said couldn’t remember precisely. He said the “inter alia” issues had to do with requirements that a future hotel built on the site have a unionized workforce.
City development chief Kelly Murphy said those issues are or will be discussed in other venues. Ward considered them inappropriate for a DLDA.
He offered to give Wilkinson a copy of the Amendment Two language from 2005 to the agreement for his clarification.
Reim with Commissioner Pedro Soto.
The Board of Aldermen can discuss those issues later this week when they convene to vote the proposal up or down. The mandate of the commission was to vote on whether the proposed Coliseum project conforms not in detail but to the overall goals and objectives of the DMDP.
The commissioners voted unanimously that the project does.
Reim thanked Kelly Murphy, Ward, and other officials for fast-tracking the proposal because time and interest rates are the project’s biggest concerns, he said.