Retail Consultant Voices Concern With Hometown Plan

MAITLAND, FL-It isn’t every day here that a prominent national retail consultant decides to spar with his hometown city fathers. But that’s what’s happening in this Orlando suburb of 12,019 residents where the area’s second highest concentration of class A office space is located.

David W. Marks, a former Trammell Crow Co. executive and president of Marketplace Advisors Inc., says his city’s multi-million-dollar town center development plan is flawed and that city commissioners agreed on the plan before asking for public discussion.

Maitland officials couldn’t be reached at GlobeSt.com’s publication deadline. But a planning department staffer says the town center project is “getting all the public meeting attention it deserves.”

Marks, however, says, “I have voiced my concerns but the city’s plan is not evolving. It’s as if they made all their decisions before they began to ask for public input.” He adds, “I’m only a concerned citizen here, but I’m very concerned.”

Specifically, Marks says the city’s current design is “out of scale with the community, disrespects the community’s heritage and could turn Downtown Maitland into Downtown Anywhere.” He says, “We’re not Marin County, California. 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 consultant says “intelligent changes in the city’s plan could save Maitland taxpayers millions of dollars and allow the project to start much sooner. 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.”

Marks adds, “A parking garage is disrespectful to our heritage and it also destroys a beautiful hammock of oak trees.”