Chinese developers broke ground on the Marina District Saturday morning with investors Wu King Hung and Yuan Xiaohong of the firm Dashing Pacific Group in attendance.

East Toledo District 3 councilman Mike Craig expected the sale to the developers of 69 acres of Marina District property for $3.8 million to have closed late last week before the groundbreaking. The sales contract is to include options for the Chinese to purchase more property in the 127-acre Marina District.

No detailed site plans were released at the groundbreaking.

Dean Monske, President/CEO of the Regional Growth Partnership, said, “There was no reason to make any effort to spend time and money for details until they knew they had a deal and they were going to be the owners of the property. Now that (the vote) happened, literally as of (the vote) they are working now on producing those detailed site plans.

“Of course, they have to go in front of the planning commission. All those details, what can be done, what can’t be done, the overlays, everything about it — Scott Prephan and others have already spent day after day on a minutia of details of what we can do and can’t do. And, we want a lot of input from the community — they’ve said that from day one, “Monske continued.

“They got that across to people at city council, and they want proactive community input, especially from those people that are closest to it — meaning those people at the east side. They said we would love to be part of getting the right people to get input, and Scott said, ‘Absolutely, that’s what we want.’ So there will be a lot of input to make sure it fits in with the area and it’s successful.

“What you’ll see is the conceptual drawing, and it’s something very similar to what was proposed before — mixed use. You’ll have commercial, you are going to see residential, and you are going to see the same kind of mixed use that was proposed before.”

The other concern remaining is about where construction labor will come from on the $200 to $300 million development the Chinese are planning.

“You know, now we can try and work for a project labor agreement. Now, it’s appropriate. And, I don’t think it will be that hard to get one,” Craig said after council’s vote.

East Toledo businessman and River East Associates chairman Dan Steingraber said, “Rudolph-Libbe has a memorandum of understanding to be the general contractor on this project. So local labor is going to be used and Rudolph-Libbe is predominantly a union shop.”

Architectural review
Craig said council was considering the Toledo Lucas County Port Authority’s nomination of A. Bailey Stanbery to the Marina District’s Architectural Review Committee. In 2007, then-mayor Carleton S. Finkbeiner established the committee, which consists of five members.

The port authority says in a press release that the recent investment in the Marina District generated a renewed interest in the re-establishment of the committee, so it considered appointing the Seaport Committee Chairman, Stanbery, to the seat. The port authority was also asked to fill the committee seat of the pending Property Owners Association until an association could be formed.

Craig believes having the right architecture is vital to the development’s success.

“What I would love is if they had other international groups in there, and they did their own style of architecture so it would kind of be an international village,” Craig said.

“I’m sitting there looking at this piece of property right now, and would it look better with buildings on it? It doesn’t matter the style of the buildings. Not all the property between the road and the river is designated park. They do have certain pads where you could build other things. But, a majority of that is park space,” Craig continued.

“One of the pads they do have is right next to the Martin Luther King Bridge, and it would be nice to see not necessarily a high rise building there, but something eight, nine stories high to give that view across the river, up and down the river, maybe a hotel with some other commercial offices and stuff. That would be very nice.”

The developers have released conceptual drawings, and Prephan told The Press those were created specifically for the Marina District and are not stock visualizations.

Monske added, “Early on, whatever the city had in things they’ve used before, as far as some of the overlays on what can be done and what pieces can be developed and what have you, and certainly one of the biggest issues is the public access by the water. Those are things that cannot be changed because there were federal and state dollars that were used for it.

“They were certainly made aware from past discussions, and Scott worked with different parts of the city to make sure they understood what could be done and what couldn’t be done, and that’s how they came up with the conceptual pieces to begin with.”

Connecting The Pieces
The concern of many east side officials is that the Chinese integrate the Marina District into the nearby Garfield community. A coalition of east side organizations formed the East Toledo Union with the purpose of doing just that.

The ETU is one of the realizations coming out of a $200,000 T-grant from the Local Initiative Support Coalition’s (LISC) “Connecting The Pieces” project, which concluded its findings over two years ago. The grant was originally established to support the development of a neighborhood transformation plan to connect old and new neighborhoods in light of the pending Marina District.

“Hopefully that will all tie together,” said Jody Gross, ETU coordinator. “I know that people have an issue with the whole thing, but it’s a good thing for us and at least the mayor (Mike Bell) is pushing in the right direction to get that developed.”

Steingraber said, “We’ve had some conversations with the representatives (Prephan) of the developer, and we’ve expressed our concerns regarding things like Connecting The Pieces.

“The representatives at least, because you never get to talk to the developers, have assured us that East Toledo will be part of the process. We asked (City of Toledo development director) Brad Peebles to forward them a copy of the Connecting The Pieces document, so they understood where we were coming from,” Steingraber continued.

“We expressed our main concern that the concepts in the Connecting the Pieces document was at last significantly considered if not fully embraced. We want to make sure the neighborhood benefits as much as possible and we want that project to be as successful as absolutely possible.”

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