Council approved a deal Tuesday night to give the former Rose Furniture building to Historic Rose Furniture LLC to restore and reuse the structure. The city will give the developer $300,000 to stabilize the building and make repairs.
The ownership group will purchase 44 S. Main St, which is the adjacent building to the south, owned by Tom Ewing, of Middletown. Upwards of $100,000 in damages was caused by the Rose building’s leaky roof, and the city was legally obligated to repair.
The deal gives the city a bottom line number, which would have been at the low end of the city’s other option concerning the building. Razing the building while keeping the facade, and to fix Ewing’s building would have cost a minimum of $300,000, but city officials believe it could have been higher.
Anita Scott Jones, who asked several pointed questions of Steve Coon — one of the principles of Historic Rose LLC — and staff two weeks ago, spent “a great deal of time” touring four of Coon’s buildings in Hamilton since the last council meeting. Coon has invested millions in restoring five buildings in downtown Hamilton and has been a key part of the revitalization efforts of that city’s downtown.
“Because we’re going to have to spend almost this amount of money whether we’re going to demolish it or not, I feel comfortable moving forward with this,” Scott Jones said.
Coon calls Tuesday’s vote “definitely a step in the right direction.”
“This is how you bring communities back, and it looks like Middletown is ready to come back to life,” he said.
The owner of Coon Restoration and Sealant had redeveloped several properties in Hamilton — sites staff toured before recommending the deal — and will do the restoration work. Coon, who has successfully received state and federal historic tax credits to help pay for other projects, said the city and council “are just forward thinking.”
“They’re not doing anything different than the other cities I’ve worked with,” he said. “They decided they wanted to recast their downtown into a whole new downtown.”
Mike Robinette, another one of the principles in Historic Rose Furniture LLC, said the group will pay $125,000 for the property. Ewing purchased the property in September 2011 at a bank sale for $32,900. Robinette said his group offered as much as they did because of their faith in the income potential, and belief it can be a $200,000 property once restored.
“We obviously like the properties, we like the location, and we think there’s a good opportunity there, or we wouldn’t be working on the project,” he said. “We think that block of Main Street has potential there.”
The amount of money that will be invested to restore the building is not yet known, Robinette said. City officials said Tuesday they were told the group would invest at least $2 million, but Robinette said it’s premature to give an estimate because “an exact number won’t be known until the engineering is done.” That could take three to four months to complete, he said.
Engineering plans are expected to be completed in three to four months, but Robinette said the priority is to dry out the Ewing building and stabilize the Rose building, which could take about 90 days. The buildings are suited, Robinette said, to accommodate commercial and residential spaces.
Councilman Josh Laubach, though he supported this project, said this is an opportunity where the city should question itself on being in the property ownership business. The city acquired the Rose Furniture building in October 2011 from the state at no cost. Middletown Economic Development Director Denise Hamet said the city had only made a partial roof repair in maintenance for the property.
“Obviously, given the circumstance, given the position we’re in now, this is the best option. But I think this is a point in time where we look at and say, ‘We don’t want to keep doing that,’” Laubach said. “There’s enough interest I believe in the city that we don’t need to be in and involved and holding and developing and fixing (buildings) and loaning money.”
Several companies in recent years have spent millions of dollars in Middletown by investing in their own companies, including PAC Worldwide and Quaker Chemical, Hamet said.
PAC Worldwide has invested $33 million in plant and equipment, including the construction of a new 350,000-square-foot building on Cincinnati-Dayton Road. Quaker Chemical has invested $20 million, mostly in equipment, but it includes a 12,000-square-foot expansion to its current building on Yankee Road.
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