City staff will prepare contract documents concerning proposed options on two downtown properties – the former Belk building and the former Hotel Louise.

The city intends to assign those options, after following required procedures, to a to-be-determined third party or third parties for development purposes. The city hired the University of North Carolina’s School of Government to assist it with this process.

The proposed aggregate cost for the options on the two properties is $23,000. The aggregate cost for acquisition of the two properties is $841,000. The city plans to use general-fund money to finance the cost of the options for the two properties.

“For the last eight to 10 months, under the approval of council and guidance of (City Manager) Brian Alligood, we have been negotiating on behalf of the city option contracts for two key properties here in downtown Washington,” said Jordan Jones, a project manager with the School of Government’s Development Finance Initiative, to the City Council during its meeting last week. “The goal here is not for the city to acquire the properties but to acquire site control and option contracts so we can assign this purchase contract to a future developer that we will be identifying in our work as we start getting more involved in this process.”

Jones said during the next six to eight months the DFI team will be working in downtown Washington to “think through potential uses of these sites.” Jones said that team is aware that the council has expressed an interest in a hotel for downtown Washington.

“This is one of the uses we will be exploring for these two buildings in downtown Washington, along with others uses like retail, office and apartments,” Jones said. “We’ll also be (developing) a financial model as well as marketing these sites to multiple developers.”

Jones said the goal in the coming months is to find a developer or investment group that the city could assign the purchase contracts to — with such an entity closing on the properties and not the city. Jones said the DFI team will conduct extensive analysis and provide a recommendation concerning whether it can find an investor group to which the city could assign the purchase contracts.

Dee Congleton, a member of the Washington Area Historic Foundation, voiced concerns with the future of the former Hotel Louise.

“We all do know it has some historical context, and I assume that a developer may want to tear the Hotel Louise down, etcetera. So, I’m very concerned about that,” she said during the public hearing on the options proposal.