What is your opinion about the old bowling alley property?

It has been closed since the late nineties. Coming up on thirty years, empty, on the main road through town. That is bizarre, and it is worth asking why.

The first question is the simple one, and I have not heard anybody ask it: what can go there by right? The city’s own housing site list already has the answer. The bowling alley is site 21, it is zoned General Commercial, and the city puts it at a maximum of twenty six units. The housing is allowed. That part is not in dispute. What the owner wants to do with it, and what we are willing to let happen, is.

Here is where we have it backwards. We ask an applicant to spend a fortune on plans, studies and consultants before anybody will tell them whether the basic concept even works. There should be a way to have that conversation with the city first. If a project is allowed by right and the numbers work, let the market work. The moment somebody needs something the code does not allow, then it is on them to make the case to the community. That is the right order and we have it reversed.

If residents decide they don’t want private development there, that is a fair answer and it is a different question. The city could buy it, or negotiate a long term lease, and put a senior center or a youth center there. But then we have to be honest about the rest of the sentence. Residents would be paying for it, and the operating cost goes into the city budget every year after that.

I have been a commercial real estate professional for forty years and I still am. I have been involved in more than a thousand transactions like this one. The City Manager and the City Council should not be picking the winner before anybody knows what the market will support.

So we have a choice. We can decide what we want on that corner and go get it, or we can keep it hard enough to do anything that the building is still sitting there in another thirty years. Decide what we want, what we can afford, and what we are actually willing to do about it.