Kohl's Divide: French calls Mayor’s response to Kohl’s flop an ‘excuse’

Written by Chip Ramsey | 22 January 2012

When plans for a proposed Kohl’s department store
in Manchester were scuttled last month, the firestorm
over who dropped the ball on the deal erupted into a
politically-charged debate that is still smoldering.
According to developers who brought Kohl’s to the
table, city officials, including Mayor Betty Superstein
and Manchester Water and Sewer Director Bryan
Pennington were not cooperative early on in process.
In an email sent from the mayor to a representative
of the Roberts family which owned the property destined
for the retail giant, developers were told that the
city couldn’t make the numbers work” on a request to
move a city-owned sewer line off of the middle of the
site. Cost: $32,000.

The site is located on Hillsboro Boulevard in front of
Home Depot, and the Kohl’s store, along with at least
five other retail chains would have been built there generating
millions of dollars in sales tax revenue over their
lifespan.

The sewer line originally had been laid across the
Roberts’ property some 25 years ago when the family
gave the City of Manchester a free easement – with a
“gentleman’s agreement” that the city would move the
line if the property was ever developed. But when the
request was made for the city to holds its end of the
agreement up, roadblocks to the process added
months of delays to the development which Kohl’s
eventually canned on Dec. 6, 2011.
The company’s public statement was that their
future sales projections no longer warranted a store in
Manchester.

However, had the initial request to move the sewer
line been honored early on, the building would have
been in operation by September of 2011 – two months
before the bad sales forecast.

According to developers, the mayor and some board
members only joined the effort to land Kohl’s once a
third-party developer from South Carolina was brought
in by the Roberts family to negotiate with the city. This
was long into the process, according to developers and Alderman Ryan French.

After The Saturday Independent’s Dec. 17,
2011 editorial, “Kohl’s debacle was a bad political
lesson” was published criticizing the board’s early
foot-dragging, Alderman Donnie Thomas, in a
fist-pounding show of bravado at a publically-televised
board meeting, demand the paper give an
apology for the “lies they told on us [the board].”
The paper stood by its editorial and the following
week, Mayor Superstein ordered City Attorney
Gerald Ewell to create a timeline that showed only
the city’s late-game involvement in the Kohl’s
process. The timeline was published in The
Manchester Times the next week. Superstein was
quoted in the article saying she supported Ewell’s
recollection of the process. Ewell spoke on behalf
of the board.

But Manchester Alderman Ryan French rejected
the veracity of the city’s timeline and the implication
that he agreed with its sentiments. French’s
letter to the editor explaining his side of the issue
is on page A4.

“There is a complete divide among the board
from that letter,” French told The Saturday
Independent, “and it does not need to represent
the board if that’s not what we all stand behind.
“I believe that the Board of Mayor and
Alderman spun the letter – particularly in the
Manchester TImes article – as an excuse for the
whole board,” he said. “I don’t think it was intended
to come from Ewell that way, but that’s the way
it was spun to the public.“I believe they wanted a “cloud” for the public
that the letter was a legal opinion – which it is not.
French said that the city “didn’t take it [the
Kohl’s development] that serious. “Nobody
proactively educated themselves about the particulars
of the situation.”

While it rejected the Roberts’ family’s initial
request to move the line at a cost to the city of
roughly $32,000, the board eventually offered
Kohl’s a $300,000 economic package to defray
construction costs.

French said the matter should have been dealt
with nearly two years ago, when the city was first
approached to move the sewer line at a much
cheaper price than the $300,000 package that
came to late, according to him and others
involved in the deal.

Ironically, no public notice about a special called
meeting to confirm the $300,000 package
was ever issued. State law demands that proper
and timely notices about public meetings be published
in a local newspaper. The Saturday
Independent never received such notice about
the special-called meeting which took place in
November of last year.

The Saturday Independent made three
requests for the public notice. The initial request
from the paper to the city to produce evidence of
the meeting notice was ignored. When pressed in
an email, administrative assistant to Mayor
Superstein, Amy Loyd responded: “Any further
questions regarding this meeting may be directed
to the City Attorney, Gerald Ewell, Jr.”
Ewell is not responsible for sending out public
notices. Those are usually sent to local media by
Ms. Loyd.