In December, work crews began clearing the Southdowns property on which Tommy Spinosa plans to build his traditional neighborhood development, Rouzan. The crews cleared away limbs and trees that had fallen during Hurricane Gustav and removed an old chain-link fence that lined Perkins Road. The sight of a bush hog and tractor on the property led some people to conclude that construction soon would begin.
At a mid-January meeting of the East Baton Rouge Parish Library Board of Control, Spinosa further fanned speculation that the project was on the fast track, telling the board he hoped to have land donated to the city-parish for a new branch on the site within 30 days.
But nearly two months have passed since that meeting, three months have passed since the land was cleared, and little else has happened at the site. No property has changed hands, and no final construction plans have been submitted to the Department of Public Works, which means no permits have been issued and no construction can begin—all of which signals that no financing is in place.
“He can’t do anything without money, and he’s obviously having—let’s face it, everybody’s having a problem with financing right now,” says Dan Reed, library board chairman. “It doesn’t matter if you want to do something. If you can’t get the money, you can’t do it, and that’s what is going on here.”
At least that’s what appears to be happening. It’s hard to know for sure, because Spinosa declines to be interviewed. What is clear is that even if financing for the project was to become available tomorrow, several issues need to be resolved before the long-awaited project can become a reality.
Chief among those issues is the donation of land for a new branch library, something that many people think should have happened months ago. Last summer, Spinosa and the city reached a preliminary agreement that called for him to donate to the library board a parcel of land in the center of Rouzan for a branch that the board would pay to have built. In November, the Planning Commission approved the plans for the library as well as plans for an apartment complex.
While the library plan has now been in the works for months, no land donation has taken place. Reed says part of the problem is that no deadline for the donation was specified. Because work has not started on Rouzan’s infrastructure, the board has not pushed to accept the donation.
“We don’t want it if it’s not going to be part of a deal—streets and drainage and so forth,” Reed says. “The only thing they’re offering to donate to us is the footprint of the building, and that won’t work for us unless the development goes forward.”
Since January, parish attorneys have been working with Spinosa’s lawyers to renegotiate the terms of the preliminary agreement to include protections for the library board, should Rouzan not move forward. According to the parish attorney’s office, the agreement stipulates that the city doesn’t have to do any construction on the library until after the infrastructure work is completed. It also gives the city the option, though not the obligation, of retaining the property if Rouzan does not proceed.
No further details are available. Assistant city attorney Leo Daubin says the sides are close to completing a final draft of the agreement. Reed wonders if it will ever happen.
“I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck,” he says. “It seems that subjectively there’s a problem. That’s why we’ve asked the parish attorney to try to pin this down, so we don’t get cut short if it turns out we’re right.”
Land for the library isn’t the only donation Spinosa is required to make to the city. DPW has stipulated that a portion of the Rouzan tract be donated for construction of a sewer pumping station that is needed to help alleviate overflows that occur during heavy rain in the surrounding Southdowns neighborhood.
In a memo last October, DPW notified Spinosa’s engineers of the need for the land, and they agreed to work with the city. So far, however, no specific site has been identified. Meanwhile, plans for the pumping station also remain in the preliminary stages.
“We haven’t gotten any information from them on this, and we haven’t given them any information,” DPW Subdivision Engineer Shannon Dupont says, noting that Spinosa could receive building permits before all of the details of the pumping station are finalized.
“They can work that out while they’re doing construction,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense to hold up their building permits if they’re building the sewer concurrently.”
While DPW says it will issue permits before the pumping station is resolved, the agency won’t issue any building permits until it has signed off on Spinosa’s final construction plans for Rouzan. So far, it hasn’t seen any. The engineering documents show far more technical details than the final development plans that were approved by the Planning Commission, and DPW needs to review them carefully, a process that could be as short as a few weeks or as long as several months.
“We can deny them permits until the drawings are satisfactory, and there’s no telling how long that may take,” Dupont says. “It could be for a multitude of reasons.”
There’s no word on when Spinosa’s engineers will deliver the final documents or what’s behind the delay. Based on the developer’s problems with previous projects, and his history of being sued for not paying vendors and contractors, some people have speculated he could be behind in payments to the firm doing the Rouzan plans, Benchmark Engineering. Benchmark executives, however, did not return calls for comment.
Whatever the reason, the plans have been slow in coming; it has made for something of an unusual review and approval process, according to city government officials.
“It’s been sort of a convoluted process,” DPW Director Pete Newkirk says. “Typically, when somebody wants to build something, it’s kind of a rush thing. But we’re not really set up for when someone pushes the deadlines to the limit.”
Then there’s the traffic plan, which remains a question that has yet to be answered. In order to receive construction permits, Spinosa first must have approval for a traffic mitigation plan that addresses the excess capacity Rouzan is expected to impose on nearby roadways, especially Lee Drive and Perkins Road.
DPW and the state Department of Transportation and Development have to sign off on the plan. Because Lee is a city street and Perkins is a state highway, the plan will provide an updated vehicle count. During the contentious approval process, Southdowns residents were especially concerned about Rouzan’s impact on an already congested area. City leaders concede they’re still not sure what to do about it.
“He’s going to have to get DOTD approval for whatever he does with the traffic design, and that’s always been an issue,” says a city official familiar with the project. “The challenge has always been, how do you comply with the additional traffic?”
Where the traffic plan is in the completion process is somewhat sketchy. Earlier this month, DPW Traffic Engineer Cyndi Pennington received word from Spinosa’s traffic engineers that they would send the traffic study and mitigation plan to her office “within the next couple of weeks.” As of March 12, however, no plans had been submitted. The traffic engineering firm, Urban Systems, declined to comment.
Once the plans are submitted, there’s no telling how long it will take for DPW and DOTD to give the OK. Pennington doubts DPW’s approval process will be lengthy. But a DOTD engineer says the state’s review and approval could take months or more.
“It just depends on whether there are a lot of revisions that need to be made or not,” says Bert Moore, a DOTD district traffic engineer. “Being that this will be a large development, I anticipate there will be a wide area it impacts. I can’t say how long.”
Permits or not, nothing is going to happen at Rouzan until Spinosa secures financing for the project. So far, he hasn’t. Whether he’s close is a subject of intense speculation in local business circles, given the mounting financial pressures he faces at his mixed-use development Perkins Rowe, which currently is in foreclosure.
When questions about Rouzan’s financing were discussed last fall by the library board, Spinosa sought to quell fears by making available to Reed the names of two banks from which he’s hoping to borrow: one for the commercial side of Rouzan the other for the residential. Reed cannot discuss specifics of those conversations, but says he wasn’t given any assurances.
“They were reserved in what they said,” he says. “Both said they didn’t see any impediment, but they didn’t say the loan had been approved or that it would be approved … so I don’t know.”
No one knows, and speculation is idle. Experienced commercial bankers have mixed feelings about how much weight lenders will give to Spinosa’s problems at Perkins Rowe when evaluating Rouzan. In general, they say, lending institutions look at more than the merits of a project.
When a bank is deciding whether to lend a developer money, it must “consider all factors,” one local banker says. “The person and viability of the project and previous projects” become considerations.
But others say Rouzan is too good a project on paper not to happen, even if getting it done takes longer than originally anticipated, and even if Spinosa has to sell off more of his equity in the project than he’d like to an investor who can help him get financing.
“I would be surprised if it didn’t get done, reason being it’s in such a great location,” another banker says. “I can’t imagine it not being successful, and anybody who knows the market and does their homework would see there is potential.”
One thing working in Spinosa’s favor is the generous amount of time he has to get the project done. The city’s TND ordinance gives developers two years from the date on which a particular phase of a plan is approved to begin construction. It’s easy to request a one-year extension under the current law, however, and proposed changes soon could give developers even more time. The city’s Zoning Advisory Committee currently is studying revisions that would give developers an automatic three-year extension on their TNDs as long as they have broken ground on the infrastructure.
“That really means you basically have five years from the time of approval to get started on your project,” says Angela Angelloz, a Southdowns resident and Rouzan critic. “That seems awfully favorable to developers.”
Such changes to the ordinance will have to be approved by the Planning Commission and the Metro Council, but there’s a good chance they will be. City planners have been arguing since last year that the TND ordinance deadlines are too stringent, especially in this tough lending climate, and the Planning Commission and the Metro Council have a history of favoring developers.
For Rouzan, such changes could be particularly fortuitous.
“If those changes go through, all he’ll have to do is break some ground between now and January,” Angelloz says. “Then he’ll have three more years before he has to do anything else.”
