Typically on the Friday before the following week’s Wednesday-evening council meeting, city staffers send council members the legislation, staff reports and other information that the city’s elected officials need for that meeting.
“I am very sensitive to providing City Council ample time to review/ask questions,” Smith wrote to the council. “I do not want to submit the Agreement to you during or after the weekend, when you may not have appropriate time to review.”
“Unless we hear otherwise, look for the Development Agreement to be on the October 24, 2018, Council Agenda,” he added.
Administrators appeared to have built in a time cushion weeks ago when they announced they hoped to hold the vote on Oct. 10, yet announced they planned to hold a groundbreaking ceremony for Spooky Nook construction on Oct. 25, the day after the following council meeting’s date of Oct. 24.
Smith and Spooky Nook owner and founder Sam Beiler have told the Journal-News that discussions and efforts to balance the project’s budget have been extraordinarily complicated, a reason the development pact has taken so long.
The “capital stack” of funding sources that will pour into the project is “the most complicated that I’ve seen, certainly,” Beiler said in August.
RELATED: Butler County asked to give $5 million for Spooky Nook
“The development agreement speaks to about eight other agreements,” Beiler said. “And all of them have to come together. So it didn’t really make sense to get into the overall development agreement without relative certainty that the other components would align as we needed them to.”
The project will include at least one hotel inside, plus a boutique hotel to be built in a second phase within the former Champion Paper Mill office building that faces the Black Street Bridge.
It also includes about a dozen restaurants or other stores that face outward toward North B Street and inward, toward the interior of the hotel building and convention space.
Credit: Nick Graham
Credit: Nick Graham
The project has many moving parts, said Beiler, who estimated there are a dozen components in the funding.
“After three years of work on the capital stack, I’ll bet we’ve explored no less than 50 options, or opportunities, to finance the project,” Beiler said.
The various funding sources have to be spelled out in the development agreement.
MORE: Spooky Nook traffic might not be so bad. Here’s why.
Spooky Nook and the city have worked on a variety of complicated funding aids, including more than one form of historic tax credits, to finance the project, which will cost about $150 million. Also involved are loans that will be made available based on the project’s energy efficiency. Spooky Nook’s first phase is expected to be finished in the summer or fall of 2021.
Mark Hecquet, executive director of the Butler County Visitors Bureau, this week told the Journal-News his organization already has booked the AAU girls national championships, a 300-team event, for 2021.
Denise G. Callahan contributed
About the Author