At a special meeting on April 30, 2026, Erie City Council voted 5-1 to approve a conditional use permit for Scott Enterprises to build an eight-story, 139-room AC Hotel with three restaurants/bars on the Bayfront. The approval came with seven conditions addressing open space, landscaping, public access, and wildlife safety, following extensive public comment and council debate about economic equity, affordable housing, and community benefit.
And bring this ACUS session into order. Tonight we are meeting with a special meeting with the agenda before us to to vote on the resolution and discuss here in caucus the resolution that's before us regarding the harbor place. We have a set of conditions that we've laid out. But this is our opportunity right now as council to discuss before we move into the meeting where we're gonna vote. So I'm gonna pause and see if we do have a couple guests here this evening if we would like to ask any questions of them. Um so that that's that's in front of us as well. Um but I want to pause and kind of open the floor up to council to see if we want to go through the resolution if there's any questions on on the conditions that we have laid out while we have the solicitor and everyone here. Can we just go over some of the changes if you know on a whole no one got to see specifics? Uh Jason, are you ready for the hot seats? Just the material to let me see here. So I don't know if I would agree that they were material. It's just that they were already in place and the changes reflect the original intent of the document. Um condition was unchanged. The number two section, there was uh the original draft had uh what was called a contiguous areas. However, that presents a really a an in a barrier for the because it can't be continuous because the whole campus, I'll call it a campus for lack of better word, involves stuff north of Front Street and south of Front Street. So you can't really make a contiguous area that's all green space as well. So that was one of the things we took out. Now the other thing the two is so they're gonna have their certain green space, and you're gonna have the other uh we call the impervious surfaces. So it's impervious surfaces, um initially we had 20% in discussing with everything, it sounds like 40% is a more reasonable number, and that includes because there's gonna be a paved walkway that's gonna be for public access, that's gonna have I don't know if it's gonna be like a farmer's market or access for people to sit on the benches, and that also will help. So that's one of the changes there. Now if you go back up to 2A dealing with uh regionally native species, the problem with this, and the reason we changed it to them to incorporate it where it was reasonable, is for instance um as explained that grass, so naturally occurring grass that would be used for like say a lawn in Pennsylvania doesn't sub doesn't last all winter. So there the grass they use is the Kentucky bluegrass. And so Kentucky bluegrass obviously is from Kentucky, it's not native to Great Lakes region, but that's the grass that's used for you know if you want to look there's a this second yeah on page two though, so I'm in 2A. So all the grass theories wouldn't even qualify for regionally in base or regionally uh grasses, if that makes sense. So it's kind of like that way. And the same thing with flower beds. If the flower, and the goal for the flowers too is not to be replanting new flowers, you know, every single year, but you want to have it that we can do the native species, and then but still have people the ability to upkeep the landscaping um all year round, and or hopefully not have it killed during the winter season. Um going down to paragraph three. The only change that was made to three was you'll see in the middle of that paragraph, vehicular use areas. So the add the addition was the parenthesis for that excludes a vehicle emergency, I'm sorry, excluding emergency vehicle access. So I think this is the idea is that we have all this square footage that's for open space or green space and for public access. But what if um there's an emergency, there's a fire, and so for like say an hour, certain places are off limits due to the emergency. Now it would make sense. You're like, well, that's an emergency. No one's gonna complain about that and maybe measure the square footage. But there's a possibility that one whole street or maybe the whole area is cut off from public access. So in those areas that are cut off from public access, they would would be below the square footage requirement for open space. So that's why that's the exception that is listed there. So the other change was so the only word we added at the let's see the next last sentence it was fee-based access. We changed it to permanent fee-based access. So that would include that kind of like so, in case like someone was you know, had asked the hotel, hey, can I have my wedding pictures taken in the morning, and they maybe they would close off you know, part of the green space so that people could take their pictures, but they would only be there for a little while, then they would leave. But that's not a permanent thing that they do, it would be a special occasion, it would be rarity, so that's why we added the permanent, but otherwise, the fee-based access or private reservation, that is all the same. Number four, now number four, this was a change that reflected we had some original language that would that kind of was dealing with lighting that affected the birds or migratory species. So instead we rewrote it to really make it more broad because the part of the part of the calculation in this goes towards not just lighting. So lighting does affect some migratory birds or some other animals, but also the glass in the building as well. And so lighting doesn't really deal with the glass specifically. So having the reflections be the pro bird would be helpful as well. So that's why that was rewritten to kind of incorporate both lighting in the glass or anything else that would affect birds or wildlife. Number five was originally written to deal with um facades, the walkway area, um, public accessibility. But when we were looking at it, we're trying to make trying to translate that into the proper language.