PAC has approved to move forward with the Reasor's plan.
Not completely true. They agreed to continue talks.
The Tulsa Performing Arts Center Trust Board decided to continue talks Monday with a developer to sell a downtown parking lot for a mixed-used project that could include a Reasor’s grocery store.The proposal isn’t a done deal yet. If the developer, Flaherty & Collins, doesn’t get a Tax Increment Financing District approved, it can back out of the project. The board will also have to vote on the final contract. Monday’s action just authorized four members of the board to negotiate terms that were spelled out in the offer sheet approved Monday. Flaherty & Collins would pay the PAC Trust $5.5 million for the parking lot on Cincinnati Avenue and Second and Third streets. Renderings for the proposed project show a 12-story building with ground-floor and some second-floor retail space, as well as 240 apartments and more than 600 parking spaces. It would be called the Annex.
Tulsa PAC Trust Chairman Stanton Doyle said he hopes to have the final contract before the board in December. After Monday’s meeting, Mayor Dewey Bartlett said the decision to continue forward on the path toward a grocery store is good for the continued revitalization of downtown.
Fewer surface parking lots, he said, “really underscores the term ‘revitalization.’”
Board member and former Tulsa Mayor Robert LaFortune said the offer sheet helped to put to rest his worries about losing the parking that the lot across the street from the Performing Arts Center provides as well as having the right of first refusal should Flaherty & Collins sell the property.
The approval Monday brings to an end months of internal discussion among the board members. Their concerns have included whether they want to close the door on expanding on the parking lot in question and whether they were getting a fair price.
Meetings took place at nontraditional venues including the George Kaiser Family Foundation — Doyle works there — and the home of board member and former Tulsa Mayor Rodger Randle last week. Board member Billie Barnett said the meetings have made the group a “much stronger entity.”
Discussions haven’t been restricted to selling the lot. The board has confronted what it plans to do and the proper purpose for the funds it would receive if it sold the parking lot.