The Cleveland City Council convened on November 10, 2025, to consider a series of emergency ordinances focusing on major economic development initiatives, HUD grant allocations, public works equipment procurement, and various collective bargaining agreements. Key discussions centered on the long-awaited Warner/Swayze affordable housing project, the first instance of a Payment in Lieu (PIL) of affordable housing funds, and administrative challenges regarding the Department of Community Development's staffing levels and funding disbursement timelines.
I mean everything would have to go back. Thank you. We're going to always start off with our guests, and I believe we have two guests from Economic Development if they could join us at the table. And her guest. Thank you. All right, this is ordinance number thirteen sixty two dash twenty twenty five as amended by council members Starr Harrison and Griffin by departmental request. An emergency ordinance authorizing the director of economic development to enter into a forgivable loan agreement with Penrose Holding LLC or is designed to provide economic development assistance to partially finance the construction, pre-development, and renovation costs associated with converting two buildings located in Ward Five service area into affordable apartments for seniors and families and other associated costs necessary to redevelop the properties. And the amendment states the amendment is actually on your pads. Good afternoon. Thank you. Chair, I have with me Mr. Edward Peppers, who's the Vice President of Economic Economic Development at Midtown. This project, the Warner Swayze project. And I've also with me Afoma Zepwe, who is the project manager with our department. Warner Swayze has been a long-standing project. It is in my opinion a an incredible example of an adaptive reuse project. And I think we're really getting close to the finish line, and it's really exciting. I know that my colleagues in community development have done a ton of work on this. This project has over 20 um funding sources. And I will let Mr. Peppers kind of take it from here. Thank you, Council President and Committee. Right now, the project where we stand. We're at a little over 64 million dollars in total project cost. We're looking for a mid-December 2025 close, and that would put us with a 24-month construction period, a 1227 completion date. This project would have 112 units of affordable housing, and that would be up to 60 percent AMI. 56 units of family, 56 units of senior. In the future, we would have another phase that would have 28 workforce units as well as over 20,000 square feet of commercial space. For now, we're just focused on the 112 of LITTEC units that I just mentioned, though. Okay. That's really the overview of where we stand now, and we were seeking these numbers because the loan we do need to draw on at closing to help us with pre-development costs. We've been spending money on this for about 10 years now. And looking into the future, the actual uh TIFF is really necessary as we don't want to get to year 15 when the light tech period expires and come back because of the tax clip that's gonna hit. We want to be ahead of the game when the funds expire, when the CRA expires. So we want to have the tax the TIFF in place, so we're ready for when the everything expires. Um we did find out some really good news today. We found out that we do have a CBA with the city as of today. So that was signed, which was a huge step on behalf of uh Penrose, the development team, and the city of Cleveland. So we're happy to see. I see that that did happen. It was a lot of work on everybody's party, and I think that was a huge step in moving this deal forward and showing the magnitude of what it means to the city of Cleveland. Thank you. Director Mitchell, did you want to give any um feedback about the uh community benefits agreement? Yeah, give me an I haven't been here in a while. How are y'all doing? All right, all right. Uh the chair, we were excited about this project as was uh mentioned. This adaptive reuse. We uh negotiated a community benefits agreement that is fairly standard. Um just to give you some high-level overview.