By James Hanlon
Leader Staff Writer
A roofless, half-finished cinderblock building shell that has sat untouched at 32 E. Burdick for over a year must have “a fully completed appearance” by the end of the year, according to a modified agreement between Oxford Village, the DDA and the developer.
David Weckle, the developer, must meet a series of deadlines, Oct. 15, Nov. 15 and Dec. 31. By mid-October, trusses and plywood must be completed for the first and second floor, among other tasks. By mid-November, trusses and plywood for the third story roof must be finished. The roof must be completed by Dec. 31, 2021.
Furthermore, Weckle must complete a 55-space parking lot to “base coat status” by Dec. 31, 2021. The parking, including all landscaping and fixtures must be fully completed by July 1, 2022.
The Oxford Village Council approved the new deadlines in an amended Planned Unit Development (PUD) agreement at the Sept. 14 council meeting, in a 5-0 vote.
32 E. Burdick is part of a three-building development along Burdick, Mill and Stanton streets that Weckle first proposed to the Downtown Development Authority in 2015. Weckle owned five of eight parcels he needed for the project, while the DDA owned the other three. He proposed building a 55-space public parking lot at his expense as part of the development in exchange for the properties. The Village Council first approved the PUD agreement in Sept. 2016.
Weckle planned to construct buildings at the southwest corner of Burdick and Mill streets (32 E. Burdick), the southeast corner of Burdick and Mill (36 E. Burdick), and a building on the northeast corner of Stanton and Mill (19 Stanton St.). Each building would have been three stories, with retail on the first floor, office space on the second and condominiums on the third.
Weckle officially broke ground on the smallest of the three buildings, 32. E Burdick, in July 2019. Work on the other two buildings has not begun. The pandemic interrupted the construction progress, and the village council extended the PUD agreement another year when it expired last summer.
“I don’t want to give you all the delays, because there was just too many,” Weckle told the DDA Aug. 16. “We’re beyond those delays.” He said his biggest challenge now is getting a concrete mason under contract, since his previous contractor fell through due to the worker shortage.
Renegotiations on the PUD agreement began this summer. “Mr. Weckle was very engaged in the process of meeting with us,” said village attorney Robert Davis at the Aug. 17 village council meeting. “I think that Mr. Weckle confessed some amount of embarrassment by not having this project completed. He has lots of reasons why it’s not completed, but nonetheless, I don’t think he has a history of being a non-completed developer. So, we kicked around just about every way to get this back on track in a manner that would fulfill the needs of the DDA.”
The site development benchmarks will be verified by the village building official. Any failure by Weckle to meet the sitework deadlines would allow each party to exercise its property reversion rights, by taking back their original properties. But that’s a worst-case scenario.
“It does nobody any good if we trigger all these revisions of properties and everybody take your toys and go home and we’ll figure out who owes who what,” Davis said. “It really would be legally unproductive, in my opinion.”
At this point, the main thing the village wants out of the development is a parking lot. “Reversion is a two-way street,” Davis continued. “The concern would be, if we all did the reversions, he ends up with the parking lot and you end up with [parcels] 32, 36 and 38, which you may want to develop, but you need parking. So you would end up with developable, nice property, but you would need parking, so you would end up buying the parking lot from Mr. Weckle.”
Weckle will no longer develop the 36 E. Burdick property. He and the village will work together to market the property to a third-party developer, per the new agreement. The DDA will retain 15 percent of the gross proceeds of the sale. Originally, 36 E. Burdick was to be the site of the largest building in Weckle’s development with 26,700 square-feet.
Village Manager Joe Madore said that given current market conditions, the village is planning to allow the property to retain a residential-use option, to allow townhomes or condos, if that’s what a developer wants. “We’ve been getting a lot of inquiries around town for those types of developments. There’s people wanting to build those type of things . . . we believe that will shorten the timeframe for a developer to show up and develop that.”
Weckle’s deadlines for 32 E. Burdick were put in place to make 36 E. Burdick more marketable to potential developers. “The whole idea is by the end of the year, we want to have the building up, framed, roof on, and looking like it’s a building,” Madore said.
“When developers see that things are happening and getting done, we believe that will increase the market for the next development,” Davis said.
Village President Kelsey Cooke said, “Resident complaints that I get regularly are because we have this eyesore, awful looking building with the weeds taller than the windows. So I’m really looking forward to working with him to get it done, because he’s the one that can get it done.”
Once the building is enclosed, and the parking lot is completed, there is no deadline for finishing the interior buildout of 32 E. Burdick.
The third building development at 19 Stanton St. remains in Weckle’s control, without a required date for its development. Weckle did not respond to requests to comment on this story.