Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Well, yeah

I kinda agree with Hillary on this, which is something I noted before.

Namely that ...

1. I'm as satisfied as I can be with the outcome of the sale of the Boys & Girls Club property on Oconee Street and Billy Ramsbottom's proposal;

2. Ultimately, I think it was Ramsbottom who kinda provoked this thing. Again, he put forth a decent initial proposal and then acted stunned when the commission requested he compromise to adhere to the land-use plan;

3. It isn't as if Ramsbottom returned with 3,000 square feet of commercial space (which, quite frankly, is a small percentage of the actual proposed development) that he desired opening up to retail ... the vision of his development team was to turn this into 'live-work' space, rather than commercial space.

1 Comments:

Blogger Rich said...

While I think that Ramsbottom planned to do this all along if he didn't get what he wanted, he could afford to do so because he had the upper hand. He could legally do a whole lot more than he was proposing and it was a gesture that he didn't have to make. The commission was naive in their handling of this because should have anticipated how a real estate developer would behave if he didn't get his way. They either didn't see or refused to see that they had the weaker hand in their negotiations. They were relying on an out-of-town developer to do things out of the goodness of his heart and developers are not known for these sorts of things!!!

I think that a lower density residential development without the commercial space would have been a far better outcome than the high density residential with the bare minimum amount of commercial space that we are getting. The commission tried to get everything that they wanted and ended up with something that is worse than what was originally presented to them.

My two cents...

12:26 PM  

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