Capac DDA approves new restaurant

“Most substantial investment in Capac’s downtown”

 

CAPAC — Last Thursday, June 4, the Capac Downtown Development Authority voted in favor of selling the building at the corner of Main and Church Streets to become a restaurant.

The former Mussey Township building, still owned by the Township, will sell the building’s frontage to a buyer who plans to turn it into a Mexican Restaurant.

The buyer will be responsible for purchasing the liquor license, and one of the stipulations of the sale was that the building would not be turned into apartments until it had been owned for an entire year.

According to the board, the township bought the building — which was considered undervalued and in need of renovation — as a way to keep it from being bought and turned into a building that doesn’t serve a purpose for downtown.

It was also a measure made to maintain the historical nature of it.

“The proposal is $750,000 of investment,” Said Travis Youatt, Village Manager. “So over the course, if they put $750,000 into the building, they pay $180,000, that’s just shy of $1,000,000 … That’s the most substantial investment in Capac’s downtown.”

During the meeting, Stacia Miller, owner of Miller’s Place and DDA member, expressed her concerns about opening a restaurant that directly interferes with her own.
“I’m not here to tell you that I want you to protect my business, save my business, keep it from competition,” she said. “when we discussed this [at a previous meeting] … we were talking wineries, breweries, we weren’t talking a place that’s exactly the same business as I’ve got. I would just like to ask everybody to hold off on voting on this to really analyze whether it’s going to be bringing in one at the expense of another.”

According to DDA members, there was a push to bring in local wineries to the location through advertising and listings, but to no avail.
Urgency in signing off on the proposal also came with time constraints for future repairs of Main Street, as well as avoiding a missed opportunity to add another business to downtown. Especially through a buyer with the capital to run it.

“We got a lot of empty buildings.” Said Art Malburg, DDA Chairman, “We wait on this, if it doesn’t come in, we’re going to have another empty building until we find somebody else.”

Youatt added: “The problem is that we have to prepare this building one way or another for our Main Street project, which is happening soon,” he said. “We have to do utilities, we have to do water lines, we have to do sewer underground.”

The sale of the building is meant to be a part of a downtown street-scape plan, which will eventually include implementing a social district.

According to Youatt, a social district means a downtown holds two liquor licenses, which allows people to “freely grab a drink, walk the downtown, and take it into the other establishment and just enjoy themselves.”

“We’re one of the only communities with a population of almost 2,000 people without a social district.” he said. “So this is a state program, redevelopment liquor license so that communities can create social districts and they can draw more people in to their downtown.”

The final motion was passed; the buyer will pay a mortgage of $180,000 at 3% interest over 10 years. “I believe that putting this building back on the tax roll would be a significant contribution to the DDA,” Youatt concluded.

“It would give the DDA a ton of operating money to be able to keep going and keep working on these programs to rehabilitate buildings and to bring businesses in.”

DDA meetings are held on the first Thursday of the month, 12 p.m., at the Capac Municipal Building.