[B]URLINGTON โ The company seeking to do a massive $250 million redevelopment of the Burlington Town Center mall appears to have found an anchor tenant for its planned office space.
Devonwood Investors LLC announced Monday that it reached a preliminary agreement with UVM Medical Center to lease offices to the hospital for 350 to 400 administrative workers. That would fill roughly a third of the 300,000 square feet of office space anticipated for the project.
The redevelopment would also include 274 housing units, a parking garage and retail space. It would return traffic to St. Paul Street through downtown and bring other street-level improvements that are expected to be partly financed with taxpayer money.
Devonwood Investors Managing Director Don Sinex, who owns the mall, described the deal with the hospital as an important milestone for the redevelopment.
However, it would also appear to create additional timing pressures for the massive project. The hospital needs the offices to be ready by January 2019, when some of its current leases on other properties expire, according to a Burlington Town Center news release. A hospital spokesman declined to say what leases expire in 2019 and said the hospital has not determined what workers it would move downtown if the deal goes through.
That means not only is the agreement contingent on Devonwood securing the necessary city and regulatory approvals for the project to be built, but also that those approvals take place with sufficient time to complete construction before January 2019.
Devonwood still needs to secure a development agreement with the city that would require City Council approval, sign-off from the Development Review Board and other permit requirements.
Sinex has expressed frustration at times with what he considers the slow pace of the regulatory process, but at a public forum in January he said he believes construction could start in 2017 and the office space and parking garage could be completed by October 2018.
Mayor Miro Weinberger has called that timeline ambitious but not โout of the ballpark.โ
A Weinberger spokesman said Monday that the administration plans to seek City Council approval of a predevelopment agreement with Devonwood before the end of April. That agreement would be followed by a final development agreement, which would also require council approval.
In the same news release, Sinex touted a recently completed economic impact study by Kevin Chiang, a UVM business school professor. The study found that the project is likely to create 941 construction jobs and more than 1,200 permanent direct and indirect jobs once completed.
The study projects the tax revenue to the city from the project in 2020 at $2.16 million. That includes retail, restaurant and entertainment sales taxes as well as electricity and property taxes. The state would receive an additional $8.45 million in taxes from the project in 2020, according to the study.
Of the projected tax revenue, $3.16 million would come from property taxes. Sinex currently pays $711,000 in property taxes on his downtown holdings.
Weinberger has said his administration plans to release its own tax revenue projections soon.
