PROVIDENCE – The R.I. Department of Transportation (DOT) yesterday started the process to sell by the end of 2009 the former Shooters nightclub parcel along Narragansett Bay in Fox Point. The parcel is one that East Side neighborhood advocacy groups would like to use to increase public access to the city’s waterfront.
The sale has been planned for years as part of the year-to-year cost structure that DOT created to pay for the $610 million project to shift Interstate 195 south of Providence’s downtown – dubbed the Iway project.
“We’re expecting the funds from that sale in this year, so if it doesn’t, sell we’ll be looking at a situation where we have to identify funds from some other source to pay for the Iway project,” DOT spokesman Charles St. Martin said this morning. “We’d need to find it in other projects, which means this could negatively impact something that could be built somewhere else.”
The bidding will begin at $3.5 million, he said. Yesterday, at a R.I. State Properties Committee public meeting, DOT officials were given approval to move ahead with the sale. A request for proposal should be finalized soon and the bidding process could take about four months.
In an e-mail on Sunday, Friends of India Point Park Co-Chairman David Riley made clear that his group, along with the Head of the Bay Gateway community group, wants the sale to be postponed and further discussed.
Riley pointed out several of his group’s major issues with the sale, including that “it makes no sense to sell now at the bottom of the real estate market” and that a development outside the city’s Fox Point Hurricane Barrier could put residents at risk, especially if there’s a condominium development.
“At the very least DOT should not issue its RFP on Shooters before considering the recommendations of the [Chan] Krieger [Sieniewicz land-use] report on disposing of the I-195 lands, expected in late January/early February,” Riley wrote. (READ MORE)
After the proposal process – a process that will be based on selling price, not future use plans – is complete, the former owner will have the right of first refusal, St. Martin said. DOT took the property in 2000 by eminent domain from Chestnut Properties Inc. owner Michael Kent and subsequently paid him $4.7 million for it. The city appraised the property – now down to 73,000 square feet from its original 130,000 square feet because part of it is taken up by the Iway – at $3.5 million in April, St. Martin said.
If the former owner does not buy the property at the highest bid price, the city will have the option to buy it for the same terms. Otherwise, it will go to the highest bidder, St. Martin said.
“Some people are saying, ‘Why sell it now?’” he added. “It’s because we need the money now and it’s been expected for some time.”
