The future of the city-owned site of the former World Trade Center building at the foot of Canal Street remains a mystery. For three hours Tuesday, a five-member city selection committee listened to presentations from three groups seeking the right to redevelop the site. Two want to keep the building, one to demolish it. Committee members questioned leaders of...
The future of the city-owned site of the former World Trade Center building at the foot of Canal Street remains a mystery.
For three hours Tuesday, a five-member city selection committee listened to presentations from three groups seeking the right to redevelop the site. Two want to keep the building, one to demolish it.
Committee members questioned leaders of the groups and heard from 10 members of the public. But if any members of the committee, all high officials in the Landrieu administration, have decided how they will rank the three proposals when the committee meets again in mid-August, they did their best to hide it Tuesday.
Even so, a few things did become clear during the meeting in the City Council chamber. Among them:
--James Burch, the founding "visionary" and namesake of one of the three applicant groups, James H. Burch LLC, has become virtually an invisible man. Burch did not speak during his group's presentation, and his name was barely mentioned. The group's management role has been taken over by developers Steve Peer and Peter Arey, who have much more extensive and successful development records than Burch. Peer said he would be the managing partner.
--Although its most recent written submission to the city had at least hinted that the tourism leaders who make up the Tricentennial Consortium were becoming dubious that their proposal to demolish the 33-story former office building would win the committee's endorsement, the group's spokesmen made their case for demolition as forcefully as ever Tuesday. Spokesmen Darryl Berger, Allen Eskew, Ron Forman and Ray Manning repeatedly emphasized that they consider the WTC site too valuable and important to house merely a hotel or residences. They said it should become a key public space open to the river and with a still-undefined civic attraction that could help lure millions of new tourists to the city.
--The Tricentennial Consortium has dropped its initial "placeholder" suggestion of replacing the WTC building with a towering spiral structure and observation deck, instead saying that it wants extensive public involvement before making any new proposals on what should go on the site if the present building is demolished.
--The Gatehouse Capital group has dropped its initial suggestion of creating a "Tricentennial Sky Wheel" -- a smaller version of the London Eye, a giant Ferris wheel on the banks of the Thames River -- at Spanish Plaza near the WTC building. Gatehouse CEO Marty Collins called it "a bad idea" and noted it was not part of the group's basic proposal for converting the old building to hotel and residential use.
--Although the city's original request for proposals last winter for the WTC site specified that "all redevelopment proposals should be privately financed," the committee has decided to interpret that requirement very loosely -- good news for the Tricentennial Consortium. The committee's legal consultant, attorney Scott Whittaker of the Stone Pigman firm, told it that the RFP did not define "private" and that, in any case, it only said proposals "should" and not "must" be privately financed. That leaves the door open for the tourism leaders to use $25 million from the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center to demolish the WTC building if their proposal is chosen, and if they can figure out a way around Gov. Bobby Jindal's recent veto of a bill authorizing the Convention Center to issue bonds to pay for such projects.
--A lot of people seem eager to live in the old building if it is redeveloped for primarily hotel and residential uses, as Burch and Gatehouse propose. Local real estate veteran Dorian Bennett, who would be in charge of leasing 119 apartments and four penthouses if the Burch proposal is selected, said he already has reservations and deposits for 49 apartments and two penthouses.
In their questions to the three would-be developers, Whittaker and committee member Andy Kopplin, the city's chief administrative officer, focused mostly on financial issues, trying to nail down just how much money the city could expect from each.
Kopplin told Gatehouse it is offering the least, a $10 million up-front lease payment -- and Collins indicated that even that figure could be reduced if the building turns out to have more environmental problems than expected. Collins did say Gatehouse, if requested, would consider instead giving the city a continuing share of revenue from the redeveloped building, though he seemed dubious about the idea and there was no discussion of what that share might be.
The Burch proposal offers the city $1.25 million a year during construction and then $1.5 million a year for 95 years, adjusted every five years for inflation up to 2 percent a year -- potentially as much as $388 million over 99 years. Asked if the group would consider giving the city a share of revenue, attorney Daniel Davillier said he did not think it would be legal to change the basic terms of the group's original response to the city's RFP, and that in any case the offer of a fixed payment would work out better for the city.
The Tricentennial Consortium has offered the city a flat $1.5 million a year, with the Convention Center and the Audubon Nature Institute guaranteeing the payments.
Of the 10 members of the public who addressed the committee, all said they favor keeping the WTC building. Betsy Stout of the Louisiana Landmarks Society called it "the best of our modern buildings of note" and warned that its demolition "will go down in history as Landrieu's Folly."
Longtime preservation leader Mary Lou Christovich said the building was erected in time for the city's 250th birthday in 1968 and it would be "a tragedy" to demolish it for the 300th birthday in 2018.
The committee's chairman, Deputy Mayor Cedric Grant, said it will meet again around Aug. 14 to discuss and vote on the three proposals. Besides Grant and Kopplin, the other members are William Gilchrist, director of place-based planning for the administration; Jeff Hebert, executive director of the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority; and Cynthia Connick, who serves as executive director of public benefit corporations.
The committee members will evaluate the three proposals under a formula laid out in the request for proposals, giving each a grade weighted this way: 35 percent for the merits of the proposed redevelopment, 20 percent for the developers' qualifications and "performance history," 20 percent for financial capacity and 25 percent for the financial feasibility of their proposal.
The committee will send its recommendation to the New Orleans Building Corp., a city agency responsible for overseeing the WTC site and several other city-owned properties. The NOBC board includes three City Council members, three private citizens appointed by the mayor and Mayor Mitch Landrieu. The NOBC would be charged with negotiating a lease with the chosen developer; Grant, who serves as the agency's chief executive, presumably would lead that effort.