City axes plans for former Grace Hospital site
By Rob Hindi
Windsor city council is looking for a new developer to develop the former Grace Hospital site.
Speaking on AM800's The Morning Drive, mayor Drew Dilkens says council met last Friday for an in-camera meeting and voted in favour of scrapping an agreement with Ohio-based Fairmount Properties.
The agreement with Fairmount was announced in the summer of 2020 and focused on a mixed-use International Village including residential, retail, dining, and office space.
The $100-million dollar project was known as Global Village Windsor and was expected to include approximately 450 units.
Dilkens says the city tried to work with Fairmount to realize the development of the site.
"Ultimately it felt a lot like every conversation was just like the last where we saw great renderings and great block diagrams and the project schedule that we would get, would just simply be updated to reflect the current dates and it would just show that it's going to take longer to get things done," says Dilkens.
He says he wishes Fairmount well but council wants to see some action.
"It's not that they're not reliable, I've been to Cleveland I've seen a lot of their developments in Cleveland, they build good products but at the end of the day we want to see something get built here," he says. "We just felt that through the back and forth behind the scenes, we hadn't seen enough traction to realize a development on that site and it's big site, it's almost six and a half acres.
Dilkens says the city owns the six and a half acre site on University Avenue West at Crawford Avenue.
He says a lot of residential units can be built on the property.
"We just hadn't seen the type of traction that we needed to see three years in to have the comfort that we were going to see something happen there in the near future," says Dilkens. "We met in-camera, we had a full discussion on the issue and ultimately we said you know what we're going to move on from Fairmount. We wish them well. We thank them for the interest that the showed."
Dilkens says the city plans to issue a new expression of interest.
He says the new EOI will be a 'whole lot tighter', more deadlines and milestones that must be reached to move the project forward.
In 2020, when the city started the process, Dilkens says the property was appraised at just over $1-million.
He says an updated appraisal was recently done and the land is now appraised at $4.7-million.
Three years ago, Fairmount's consortium included Windsor-area firms Architecttura and Oscar Construction Company Limited.
Last month, St. Clair College entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Fairmount Properties.
The MOU would have provided up to 400 international students with housing.
The former hospital closed in 2004 and was demolished in 2013.