LEWISTON — Phyllis St. Laurent’s proposed housing development will move forward after it won unanimous approval from the Planning Board on Monday night. The vote was 7-0.
The latest version is similar to a project voters rejected in November and is meant to replace units she lost in a rash of downtown fires in May 2013.
“Good luck, and I look forward to your project,” Chairman Bruce Damon told her. “I know it’s been arduous, but patience may win out over all.”
Jim Hatch of Developers Collaborative, working with St. Laurent, said plans call for breaking ground in August.
The plan calls for replacing the 56 units St. Laurent lost in the fire with 29 units, a mix of one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom units in three buildings. The project calls for combining eight lots covering about 0.91 acres downtown into three lots.
The project would be built on four lots St. Laurent owns — 110 and 114 Pierce St. and 145 and 145 Bartlett St. — as well as four city lots.
St. Laurent submitted the highest bid for lots at 116 and 122 Pierce St. and 139 and 155 Bartlett St. in January. City councilors put the four lots out to bid in December and St. Laurent offered to pay $61,000. Councilors had set a minimum bid of $30,000.
A ninth lot, at 82 Pierce St., would be used as a potential parking lot later on.
Parking turned out to be a big issue for the Planning Board.
St. Laurent’s project called for building three on-site parking spaces for every four units — a total of 38 spaces. City ordinances require a project of that size to have at least 58 spaces.
Hatch argued that the type of development won’t need all of those spaces.
“Ms. St. Laurent has operated Pierce Place for 30 years now and there have never been parking issues,” Hatch said. “These 29 units, before the fire, had 18 spaces. Her experience has been there have never been more than half the units that have cars. We are in an inner-city situation where many people don’t have cars and they use public transportation.”
That’s where the 82 Pierce St. lot comes in. Hatch said they would review parking needs a year after the building is occupied with a professional traffic engineer who would issue a report to the city. If additional spaces are necessary, city staff could require them to be put on 82 Pierce St.
Board members Mike Marcotte and Paul Madore had problems with that.
“The idea that we should reduce the amount of parking on projects like this has never been more problematic than what we’ve seen this winter,” Madore said. “The city cannot respond quickly enough and people are forced to park in the darndest places.”
They moved to require the project build all 58 spaces now. That failed, but a motion to have that traffic study presented to the Planning Board for approval won the board’s support.
Voters in November turned down city involvement in St. Laurent’s plan. She had hoped to build the 29 units with city help. The city would have included the lots in her project. In exchange, half of the property taxes she paid would have been earmarked to help other Lewiston landlords redevelop their properties.
The site development is otherwise unchanged from the version voters considered. It would have 77 bedrooms spread over three buildings, 32 off-street parking spaces and a large green space between the buildings.
The project will still receive federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits from the Maine Housing Authority, which will be sold to investors to privately fund the project.
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