Follow-up article from the Ithaca Journal regarding more hopeful development possibilities. I hope the hotel project is considered again.
Inlet Island draws comparisons to West State Street
Zoning change sought to encourage development
By Krisy Gashler •kgashler@gannett.com • September 10, 2010, 7:50 pm
So what lessons do city planners draw from the recent revival of West State Street?
Both former planning director Thys Van Cort, who oversaw the $1.8 million economic development investment in the street in 2001, and current planning director JoAnn Cornish pointed to Inlet Island as another part of the city that could benefit from public investment.
"Inlet Island is still ripe for development," Van Cort said. "It's one of the very few pieces of property on the waterfront that could be privately owned and taxpaying -- it's not a bad thing to have some of it privately owned and paying taxes."
"You know I'd love to be able to make these kinds of investments in Inlet Island, but the city just simply doesn't have the money, and the state doesn't have the money," Cornish said. "The economic climate has changed so drastically that I think we have to go at it in a little bit of a different way."
One way to do that is to sweeten the pot for private developers through zoning changes that allow more height and density, and therefore more return on investment.
Cornish said the planning department has proposed a memo to create a more uniform, simplified and dense zoning code for Inlet Island.
The area is covered by four different zones, one of which allows a maximum three stories and another a maximum five stories, she said. Cornish supports allowing the entire area, with the exception of the public promenade, Lookout Point and Brindley Park, to host buildings up to five stories.
"We have had interest from developers in building down there, but they're saying, 'We can't make the numbers work, it's too expensive, we've got to go up,'" she said. "Plus we don't have a lot of waterfront property we can build on, so we should capitalize on what we have."
The suggestion is circulating among Ithaca Common Council's planning committee, but there's been no vote on changing the zoning.
The last project put forward for Inlet Island -- Boatyard Grill developer Steve Flash's 2007 proposal for a five-story hotel -- was defeated by Common Council over concerns, among other things, that five stories was too high for Inlet Island. Three years later, only four of the 10 council members are the same: two who voted for, and two against.
Here's a pic with part of Inlet Island on the left (by mhaithaca @ flickr):
