Hartford Business Journal

12 Hartford Business Journal • March 18, 2019 • www.HartfordBusiness.com Public-private investment David Panagore, Hartford's chief oper- ating officer from 2009 to 2012 and who for a brief period also doubled as the city's director of development services, points to the city's long track record of using public infrastructure investment to spur private development. It has worked in the past, said Pan- agore, now town manager of Provinc- etown, Mass. For example, the city invested in the redevelopment of the former Colt Armory in the South End, expecting to spur additional private investment and property-tax collections in around the historic ex-gunmaking campus, a por- tion of which is now a national park. That's worked to some extent with the addition of new apartments and office tenants in the area. Bloomfield's Thomas Hooker Brewing Co., which years ago had plans to open near Dunkin' Donuts Park, debuted in 2017 a tasting room on the ground floor of Colt's South Armory. Panagore said Hartford's payback from the ballpark will come not from revenues shared with the Yard Goats, but from increased property taxes and economic activity from a revitalized DoNo. Increased job prospects for city residents and other intangibles also will accrue. Still, other challenges await Hartford's DoNo redevelopment vision, Panagore said. There is the pending plan to lower the I-84 highway viaduct to grade, which Panagore says threatens to fur- ther bisect Hartford, essentially creating two downtowns. City leaders also must be certain as to the type of development they want in the DoNo corridor. "If you build a supermarket,'' he said, "would people want to go grocery shop- ping if there's a ballgame that day?'' Another lesson painfully learned from the city's experience of first choosing Centerplan and later firing it and CEO Robert Landino as developer-builder, says Mathews, is that whenever developers come aboard on big projects, "they need to have some skin in the game.'' "That means if the project gets into hot water, they'll stay and fight it out, not cut and run,'' Mathews said. Asked for the Yard Goats' redevelop- ment vision around Dunkin' Donuts Park, team President Tim Restall would only say, "I think whatever is built will complement the ballpark and will complement the ballpark experience.'' Even if the stadium is a financial drag on the city's finances it has provided a boost to downtown, luring hundreds of thousands of people to Hartford during the traditionally slow summer months. That's helped local restaurants. The Yard Goats, too, have embraced the community. City residents hold many of the seasonal stadium jobs — groundskeeping, ticket sales, gate admissions and concessions — as mandated by the team's lease. The Goats, too, provide in-stadium space gamedays to a rotating roster of local restaurants and merchants who can expose fans to their wares. The team also supports city and area youth with giveaways of free tickets to school groups, churches and other nonprofits. Development agreement Salvatore, of RMS Cos., the new proposed DoNo developer, said he has found the city open and reasonable. Indeed, Salvatore, whose Stamford partnership bought and reopened downtown Hartford's Goodwin Hotel, said his interest in remaking DoNo has only grown since the city an- nounced his selection of his $200 mil- lion development bid last July. He recently reached a development agreement with the city for the first phase of the project, which will get a public hearing March 18. It calls for a $46 million investment at 1212 Main St., which will include a 200,000-square-foot mixed-use build- ing containing 200 living units, plus 11,000 square feet of retail, and 259 parking spaces. There will be an affordable-housing component to the project, which is angling for some public financing. Salvatore is asking for funding assistance from the Capital Region Development Authority averaging $60,000 per unit of housing to be built in DoNo. The balance of the project pricetag will come from bank financ- ing and equity, Salvatore said. CRDA Executive Director Michael Freimuth said the quasi-public co- development overseer for Hartford and neighboring suburbs has pledged $12 million towards RMS' first-phase "Parcel C'' development. The entire project, if completed, could include up to 800 apartments and 60,000 square feet of retail. However, until the Centerplan v. Hartford lawsuit is resolved, CRDA has shifted its funds to raze the city-owned vacant data center on Windsor Street and make other pre-development site preparations in DoNo, Freimuth said. He added that it's critical for devel- opment within DoNo to occur sooner than not. "Revenues from the subsequent development are important to not only service the debt on the ballpark and maintain a solid capital reserve for it, but to also generate tax revenue and jobs to the city that were envisioned as the upside to the actual ballpark's contributions," he said. "Delaying the development obviously prevents the city from meeting these objectives." >> Field of Urban Dreams continued Neil deMause, Journalist-author Andrew Zimbalist, Economics Professor, Smith College This Ala. city mirrors Hartford's redevelopment ambitions By Gregory Seay gseay@hartfordbusiness.com H artford isn't the only U.S. city that has bet big on a minor- league baseball stadium to spur redevelopment. In 2013, taxpayers in Birmingham, Ala., financed construction of their own $64 million downtown minor- league ballpark, to host the hometown Double-A Southern League's Barons. The project was looking to leverage development that had already started years earlier. Since 2010, thousands of apartments and condominiums have been built and acres of retail- commercial space developed to ac- commodate Birmingham's expanding population of young, middle-agers and retirees who have embraced an urban lifestyle. The stadium's debut added to that momentum with residential and commercial developments around the downtown ballpark that are under- way, completed or still planned with a nominal value of $1.3 billion, according to the Birmingham Business Alliance, a regional chamber of commerce. "It's a good mainstay for our com- munity,'' BBA President and CEO Brian Hilson said of 8,500-seat Re- gions Field. "It's an amphitheater for downtown, and downtown happens to be the hottest real estate market in the state of Alabama.'' The city of Birmingham's population of 215,000 amid a regional headcount of 1.1 million is slightly larger than Hartford's 124,000 or so residents and nearly even with the Greater Hart- ford's population. Where insurance and financial services, manufacturing and health care are Hartford's main economic drivers, Birmingham's once dominant steel-making sector has yielded much of its past influence to finance and education, led by that city's and state's biggest employer — University of Alabama-Birmingham. UAB-Birming- ham alone employs some 23,000 and has 20,000 students. Also city based, Regions Financial, parent of the bank that bought the ballpark's naming rights, is the No. 2 employer. Like Hartford, Birmingham invest- ed public dollars to erect an amenity that economic- development leaders in both cities hoped would lure pri- vate investment. While Bir- mingham enjoys some of the early fruits of its bet, Hartford is just into the early in- nings of its quest to commercially redevelop some 32 city properties around Dunkin' Donuts Park. The best thing Hartford city leaders and economic-development authorities can do to enhance their redevelopment aims around the ballpark, Hilson said, is to include neighborhood residents, organizations and other stakeholders in planning and communicating each other's revitalization ambitions. "They all need to be at the table,'' he said. Birmingham, Alabama's Regions Field, home of the Southern League Double A Barons, has helped spur residential-commercial development. PHOTO | CONTRIBUTED

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