RealtyLink, the company developing Main Street Oak Ridge, is negotiating leases with three national tenants, an executive said Thursday.
Brett Rogers, RealtyLink construction director, was responding to a question from former Oak Ridge City Council member Anne B. Garcia during a Planning Commission meeting on Thursday. She wanted to know if RealtyLink has contracts to occupy the four new proposed stores, or if changes to the project plan were being proposed on speculation.
Responding to that question, Rogers said the three large national tenants are committed to be in Oak Ridge.
“We just have to get them across the finish line,” he said in a brief interview after the meeting.
Rogers declined to name the three national tenants. That’s typical in developments, where prospective businesses generally want to control the timing of their announcements about their decisions to locate in a community.
The new tenants could be part of the second phase of Main Street Oak Ridge, the 58-acre redevelopment of the former Oak Ridge Mall.
To proceed to the second phase, RealtyLink has requested changes to the planned unit development, or PUD, for Main Street. Those proposed changes require city approval. Among the requested changes to the PUD are building four stores between PetSmart and JCPenney, removing the access road from Rutgers Avenue to the roundabout at Main Street Oak Ridge to allow those four stores to be built, removing the multi-family residential units that had been proposed in the area between Walmart and JCPenney, and including mixed-use development areas along Wilson Street as part of the third phase of the project.
The Oak Ridge Municipal Planning Commission voted 7-1 on Thursday to recommend the revised plan to Oak Ridge City Council.
Oak Ridge economic development consultant Ray Evans has calculated that four new stores at Main Street Oak Ridge could create 150 jobs and generate more than $600,000 in sales and property tax revenues for Oak Ridge and Anderson County.
In October, RealtyLink principal Neil Wilson said five national tenants were “at the table” for the next phase of Main Street Oak Ridge, although it wasn’t immediately clear if that is still the case or whether any of those five are among the three prospective tenants negotiating leases now.
Also Thursday, Rogers told the Planning Commission that RealtyLink has an “immediate opportunity” to self-develop a climate-controlled self storage facility at Main Street Oak Ridge, possibly along Rutgers Avenue. That indoor facility could be three stories and about 100,000 square feet, with roughly the same footprint as Dick’s Sporting Goods.
See the Planning Commission agenda here.
See previous story here.
See more Main Street Oak Ridge stories here.
More information will be added as it becomes available.
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