Wilmette village trustees have preliminarily approved a much-altered planned unit development zoning request from the team that wants to buy a one-time Ford dealership and turn it into retail and luxury apartments.
The only trustee who did not enthusiastically endorse the new project on was Julie Wolf, who recused herself from the April 28 meeting and the vote because her husband is an architect working on another M&R project.
Trustees must approve a new purchase contract that reflects those changes, to replace the one they approved in September of 2014, when they announced that M&R was buying the property.
The new proposal for “The Wilshore” is five stories tall with 75 apartments on the top two floors and 6,316 square feet of commercial space on the ground floor, rather than the 95-unit, six-story project M&R originally proposed last year.
In return for shrinking The Wilshore’s height – which Bielinski and fellow board members said was directly due to residents’ and potential neighbors’ near-unanimous opposition to the proposal’s size, especially during two plan commission meetings in March and April – Wilmette will cut its asking price from $4.1 million to $3.1 million.
That doesn’t cover the $3.675 million Wilmette paid for the property in 2011 when it settled a court case with the property’s former owner. What it does do, Bielinski and trustees said repeatedly before they voted, is infuse downtown with enough new residents to galvanize existing retailers.
Doing so meets the mission of Wilmette’s village center master plan, they told a Village Hall audience clearly caught off guard by the new proposal.
“We need something to kick-start the village center,” Trustee Alan Swanson said. “That is far and away the best benefit of this project.”
It also meets master plan guidelines because the plan originally called for buildings no higher than five stories in height, he and other board members said.
Equally important, trustees admitted, was getting the property off village books, and ending years of trying to make it productive with a procession of unsuccessful projects sunk by everything from the 2009 recession to previous boards’ actions.
“We as a village have paused on this site when the first initial proposals came up,” Trustee Ted McKenna said as he reacted to pleas from the audience to delay approving the case at least a month to give people a chance to inspect it.
McKenna ticked off different points since the Ford dealership closed in 2005 where proposals for the property stalled, slowed or failed before saying, “Now’s the time to move on this.”
Wilmette developer Randy Tieman, who sat on the village center master plan advisory commission agreed, and praised the project. It may not completely jibe with the master plan, but it does reflect economic changes since the plan was approved, he said before warning that taking any more time to review it could jeopardize the project.
“There’s always reasons to delay and kick the can down the road … but deals die with delays,” Tieman said.
Trustees acknowledged that the M&R plan doesn’t resemble the vision of green space and low-rise residential buildings that master plan creators foresaw for the entire 600 block of Green Bay, but Trustee Carol Ducommun pointed out the Wilshore will take up less than an acre of the 6-acre block. Wilmette still owns other lots on the block, and it should be possible see if ideas like green space or more public parking could be created.
Trustees did largely dismiss new pleas from affordable housing advocates.
Those residents, include Wilmette Cares president Lorelei McClure and group member Lisa Braganca, charged that village officials were ignoring Wilmette’s own 2004 affordable housing principles by not pushing M&R to include affordable apartment units in the project
Just because the principles are voluntary doesn’t mean staff and trustees can’t be more proactive, McClure suggested: “Wilmette Cares needs to know what you need to hear from us and others; what you need to hear to move these voluntary promises off the paper and into action.”
“If [the affordable housing plan] is to be something more than a dead letter, then this is the time,” Braganca said. “If there isn’t room for this, then please acknowledge that.”
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The arguments didn’t hold water with trustees.
“I appreciate the passion for affordable housing and the need for us to address that,” Trustee Cameron Krueger said, before casting doubt on the claim that Wilmette’s supply of affordable housing is shrinking. “I’m not sure that residents support the village subsidizing affordable housing.”
The $80,000 M&R is donating to Wilmette’s existing housing program will keep it going until a new private affordable housing program gets off the ground Krueger said.
Community development director John Adler said April 29 that village legal staff will work to reword the original contract between now and May 12, the date of the next village board meeting.
It will take longer for staff and M&R to the original planned unit development zoning request, he said. Once they do so, he can turn preliminary approval into final approval, and send that to trustees, possibly in June.
Twitter: @pioneer_kathy