The City Council held a work session on January 5, 2026, beginning at 2:00 PM, to discuss eight major items including redevelopment of the Blount and Gillespie site, a proposed veteran tiny home community, the annual Point-in-Time homeless count, a completed feasibility study for the Black Voices Museum, bond project updates, downtown municipal service district boundaries, real property lease policy revisions, and proposed amendments to the parades and demonstrations ordinance. The meeting lasted approximately five and a half hours, with council voting unanimously on most items and sending one item back to committee for further study.
Now we're ready. Okay. Well, let us start our work session with our call, our invocation. Let's all stand right after we repeat our pledge of allegiance. Councilman Hare, if you'll do the honors. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tim. Let us go to the Lord in prayer. Dear Lord Jesus, once again, we just want to say thank you. Thank you for letting us make it through the night and seeing another day that we've never seen before. Father, as we move forward in our first meeting of the year. Help us to come together, bring a bond together to move forward for the concerns and issues of the city and the citizens of Fayetteville. Let us have a great meeting this evening. Amen. So we're here this afternoon to update you on our efforts to evaluate the city owned property at the corner of Blunt and Gillespie. Today we're going to talk a little bit about the partnership we have with uh HRNA, uh the study that they performed for us, the concepts that they've helped us developed, and then the next steps. So I'm going to introduce a little bit of this in the background and then kick it over to my friend Austin to take us through the technical. All right, so just to put this into context a little bit, um, we've owned this property um about eight and a half acres on the corner of Blunt and Gillespie, less than a half mile from where we are right now for quite some time. Uh we had not fully acquired everything until recently. Um there's been a couple of concepts floated in the community and considered by city council over a 10 year period to look at what to do with this, and um for y'all that are in real estate and business, you know it starts with what's financially feasible in the market. What would somebody want to come in and want to buy, want to live in, want to shop at. And so that's why we brought in some advisors that I'll tell you about in just a moment. Uh, but we partnered with them to talk about the market potential to test different concepts on the site, what would make sense from a visual from a layout and from a financial standpoint. So a little bit of the history here. Uh back in 1902, the Smith House was built on this site. Uh that property is is now owned by the city and programmed out by the park and recreation department. Um starting in 2008 with our Hope Six redevelopment efforts, we began acquiring 41 individual parcels. Uh City Council allocated six million dollars towards Hope 6. Not all of that went towards this, some of it was infrastructure, some of it was single family housing built by some nonprofit partners in the Hope Six area. In 2016, we brought in Red Rock Global to study some opportunities around in and around downtown and and throughout the city of Fayetteville for redevelopment. And I'll talk to you a little bit about that study and where we are with that in just a moment. Back in 2018, uh, right before I got here, we looked at um uh kind of reconstituting this business park idea where there would be um business and and um office uh type stuff there. And what we found at the time was that the market wasn't quite there for it. Um then uh in 2019, uh Robert Van Gians at the Fayetteville Cumberland Economic Uh uh Development Corporation uh worked with some partners to come up with an opportunity zone vision. This area was one of those opportunity zone areas, the the Blunt Street going down it being like a warehouse district. 2020 happened and uh in March, everything changed. Uh the government shut down, COVID became a reality, and the economy economics changed. Um, and so all of these efforts kind of stalled out at that point. Uh the market changed, the demand for office space uh changed dramatically after COVID. And so in 2025, we're we had just bought the last kind of key piece of property to have every ownership of all the property in this area. And so we wanted to look at something to help contribute to the downtown's growth and the future of it. So the about that Red Rock Global uh plan. So they really looked at four different focus areas in that plan. Uh, two areas on Mercston Road, Upper and Lower Mercerson, uh, Massey Hill, and then what they called the Center City Action Park, which is the Blunt and Gillespie site. So for Upper Merkerson, uh they talked about having uh uh improvements to the roadway. Uh right now, NC DOT is undertaking a substantial improvement to that upper area, and then industrial development up towards 295. And so FCDC is our industrial development arm. So they are looking at opportunity sites and marketing those to um to industry. On the lower merchant area, they recommended a baseball stadium. Now, while we didn't build that on Merkston Road, we did build that less than an eighth of a mile away, right in our downtown. Um, and then they recommended a business center, which uh the city along with the county and Fayetteville State University have opened up the business and entrepreneurial hub.