[B]URLINGTON — A little more than a year ago, New York City developer Donald Sinex had never been to Church Street.
His business partner, a Vermonter, had told him he should buy the downtown mall, but he tossed that idea straight into the garbage can.
A year later, Sinex found his way downtown. He saw the Burlington Town Center mall and reconsidered.
“This thing begs for redevelopment,” he said.
Now the big-time developer is preparing to embark on a $200 million, multiyear project to transform the centerpiece of the Church Street Marketplace into a mix of housing, stores, restaurants, parks, offices and hotel and conference space.
Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger and Sinex have agreed on a special process to develop the plans for the project. The city council Monday night unanimously approved the proposal, which includes creating a small team of officials who will review and recommend a development agreement with the city.
The developer and the mayor say the special process will make the development review system more transparent.
The mayor’s spokesman, Mike Kanarick, said the project will go through the normal development review process after it goes through the special development agreement process.
Some in town have balked at the out-of-towner’s ambitious plans. City councilors Jane Knodell, Max Tracy and Selene Colburn sent a letter to Weinberger on Dec. 1 with 19 questions about the project and Sinex himself.
“It still seems like it’s moving very fast,” Knodell said.
In response, the mayor issued a memo, as did the city’s Community and Economic Development Office (CEDO), and the city also posted a resume from Sinex that describes some of his projects.
Weinberger, in his Dec. 11 memo, emphasized that the plan fits with the city’s grand plan for transforming downtown.
“A well-designed, thoughtful redevelopment of these two central, downtown blocks could potentially address many of our city’s largest challenges,” the mayor wrote.
Trust, but verify
Sinex is on a mission to prove to Burlingtonians that they can trust him. He said the words “public, transparency and open” more than 15 times during a 45-minute interview Tuesday.
Sinex has owned a home in Rutland Town for 12 years. He moved from Connecticut to Vermont when his children went away to boarding school because he wanted to live somewhere quieter and more outdoorsy, he said.
He commutes to New York on JetBlue out of Burlington. But now, with this project, he spends the majority of his time in Vermont.
Sinex has not embarked on a project like this before, though he has worked with many malls and shopping centers in Chicago, he said. He has also worked on New York City office building projects, including a 1.8-million-square-foot office complex in midtown Manhattan.
“Give us the time, watch how we work, then make your determination about us,” Sinex said in an interview from his office in the mall Tuesday.
The L.L. Bean Store – the first major retailer he has brought to the mall since he bought it exactly a year ago – is proof his plan will work, he said.
“L.L. Bean proves the market is here,” he said.
Plan BTV, the city’s long-term economic development plan for downtown, says the city can support another 100,000 to 200,000 square feet of retail space in downtown Burlington.
The plan says a larger supply of retail, with lower price points, might help promote an even greater expansion of retail in downtown.
His goals are to grow jobs and businesses downtown so people can live, work, eat and play without leaving the heart of the city, he says.
People will drive two hours to go to the L.L. Bean store and then buy lunch and make an impulse buy at Stella Mae or Jess Boutique on Church Street, he said, throwing out the names of two local stores.
“Our objective is to turn this center back to the community,” he said.
Sinex is also courting other major retailers, including Apple and Target. But those big stores like certainty, and the city’s approval process is long and sometimes seems subjective, he said.
“Because of the nature of land use regulation in Burlington, I’m unable to give them a time or a budget at this point in time so you can’t get on anybody’s calendar. That’s the reality of the situation and I wish people would begin to appreciate that,” he said.
But Sinex is willing to go through a public process for three reasons. First, because he says the site is important to the city. Second, because he believes residents’ suggestions will make the project better and, third, because the process increases the certainty of success.
“The more I get the public invested in this process, the more the likelihood that I’ll be getting an outcome that I can build,” he said.
The city has agreed to form a special committee to advise the city, made up of two city councilors and two members of the planning commission.
They will be assisted by a team of development experts hired by the city with $150,000 paid by Sinex’s company, Devonwood Investors LLC. That is not a conflict of interest, he said, because the experts will work only for the city.
“It’s not like I’m hiring an appraiser and I’m putting the pressure on him to give me a number,” he said.
Planning to make a plan
The details of the project are still unknown, Sinex said. He has no idea how many units of housing he will be able to build but hopes to build the most possible, so the complex can be self-sustaining.
Sinex intends to spend $200 million on the project, $50 million of which will go toward public assets such as parks and bike paths, which will not generate revenue. That means the other $150 million of investment must generate enough revenue to support the entire development.
“We know that there’ll be an affordable housing component to our project and so long as it doesn’t drag the project into a negative realm, it will be integrated into our plan,” he said.
Up to about 20 percent of the units could be affordable, more than that he said would not be profitable, he said.
Sinex hopes the permitting process will finish by May, so construction could begin in January 2016 and the complex could be open in 2018.
The project involves many components, including sinking the mall parking garage underground. That requires removing 130,000 cubic yards of debris and hauling it away.
Sinex plans to finance the project through traditional debt and equity, he said, and he is seeking investors.
The developer said he has talked to tenants of the mall and, for the most part, they like his ideas. Rents in the mall are about $35 a square foot, he said. Rents may increase, but they may also go down in the new project, he said.
Sinex said he collected about $6 million of gross revenue from the mall last year and expects to collect $7.5 million in 2015.
Existing tenants will not be forced out and all leases that have expired recently have been renewed, he said. He is prepared to offer rent abatement to any mall tenants’ business suffers during construction, he said.
Gap and Gap Kids recently left the mall for a new location on Church Street. Sinex said he doesn’t like to lose a tenant but isn’t bothered. Shoppers have to walk past his mall to get to Gap.
New stores in the mall won’t hurt other retailers’ business, he said.
“If I buy a sweater at L.L. Bean, it’s unlikely I’m going in Outdoor Gear Exchange and buy a sweater, but I could buy a bike and I could wear my sweater to go biking,” he said.
Sinex says there is a great deal of work ahead, and construction, if he gets to that phase, will be the easy part.
“This project needs a take-charge, high-energy, very high-experience individual,” he said. “That’s me. That’s me.”
