Developer Lands in Middle of $74M Redevelopment Squabble

Now the residents are hounding city fathers to hold back on the apartment project until the developer can guarantee the project will not increase traffic congestion, air and water pollution and storm water overflows, brokers following the controversy tell GlobeSt.com. The development site is between US 17-92 and George and Swoope avenues.

Preliminary development plans filed with the city show the seven-story Uptown Maitland West will have 375 apartment units, a seven-story parking garage, 45,000 sf of retail, a bank and three restaurants. Developer Steve Walsh founded Broad Street Partners in 1995. The company says it will work with the city and residents to see that all their goals are met.

But one resident who has never been happy with the city's redevelopment plan is David W. Marks, a former Trammell Crow Co. executive and currently president of Marketplace Advisors Inc., a national retail development consulting firm. Specifically, Marks tells GlobeSt.com the city's existing re-design of Downtown is "out of scale with the community, disrespects the community's heritage and could turn Downtown Maitland into Downtown Anywhere."

Marks says, "We're not Marin County, CA. We have a unique heritage and protecting and enhancing that heritage is more important to this community than trying to design something that might suit the needs of some other community somewhere else."

The marketing consultant argues that "intelligent changes in the city's plan could save Maitland taxpayers millions of dollars and allow the project to start much sooner." He adds, "We should also look at a lot more options for how we can expand our city facilities which growth has made necessary."

Marks is especially critical of the plan to tear down a public park to build a parking garage. "The park was planned in the 1920s as the Central Park for the community on the block that now houses the municipal buildings," he says. "Reversionary clauses on some of that property means it goes back to the original property owners if the property is ever used for anything besides a park or municipal complex."