“While the pictures are beautiful, the practicality of doing that and being able to pay for that is just not there.” Clarkesville City Manager Barbara Kesler summed up the current status of the downtown restoration effort to City Council Members at a meeting on Friday.
The buildings damaged by fire on March 5, 2014 are now stabilized and City Leaders must decide how to proceed with completing repairs. The Clarkesville Master Plan laid out several options ranging from adding additional floors on existing buildings to creating new structures in place of some of the damaged ones.
Leaders found out on Friday that adding on to what’s there is not physically possible. “We can’t add a story to any of those buildings as they stand right now,” Kesler explained. “If we want to have a three story building in the center, you have to tear everything down to the slab and start over because the foundations aren’t strong enough nor are the walls.”
That wasn’t the only bit of disappointing news on Friday. It turns out the city can’t afford to do much at all beyond a basic restoration.
Financing the project is complicated. The city is seeking Historic Tax Credits to pay for part of the work. Before they can get those credits, the area must be part of the National Historic Registry. The credits also come with strings attached. If the city uses that money, they will have to maintain ownership of the buildings for 5 years meaning they can’t sell to recoup the costs of repairs and would have to rely on rent from future tenants.
Public-Private Partnership Project Management (4PM), the contracted firm on the project, crunched all the numbers and Clarkesville leaders say restoring the buildings as they were is the only scenario in which the city can afford to do the work and actually pay for it with rent generated.
At their meeting on Friday, Mayor Terry Greene and Council members decided to move forward in a couple of different directions.
They still want to pursue the Historic Tax Credits and voted to hire LaBrie Consulting of Gainesville to apply for NHR status. That contract, barring any revisions of the application, totals $7695.
They are also looking for another way to pay for restoring Sharky’s and the Taekwondo location (buildings 6 and 7 on the graphic above), one that wouldn’t lock them into ownership for 5 years. They’re exploring the idea of opening that part of the project to competitive bids with a different mix of financing options. If that plan works they could have those two buildings ready for tenants sooner and the city could sell at the first opportunity.
Clarkesville City Council members will get an update at their next meeting on April 6, at 6:30PM.
