I parked my bike near this gravel lot, the site of the former Wells Fargo branch, on May 23.
Unless developer Scott Lepman goes ahead with his option to buy the former Wells Fargo Bank property in downtown Albany, the vacant lot likely will be paved as a parking lot.
That’s what the city staff recommended at last week’s meeting of the Albany Revitalization Agency, made up of the mayor and city council.
As it turned out, as I reported last Thursday, the council members decided to extend the deadline for Lepman to exercise his option to buy the city-owned property. The extension is for six months, until the end of November.
The previous deadline was May 31, and Lepman told the council he wasn’t ready to exercise it. A number of problems had come up that complicated his plan to build a four-story building with apartments, commercial space, and covered parking on the former Bank site and adjacent parking lot.
In case the Lepman project falls through, the city staff had a couple of recommendations.
The first was to seek an “alternate developer partnership” as soon as possible and to pave the gravel section of the lot (the site of the demolished bank) “to allow for code-compliant parking in the interim, to be managed by ParkWise.”
ParkWise is the parking rental and enforcement program the city council has long authorized the Albany Downtown Association to administer.
The other recommendation was to put off seeking another developer and just go ahead and pave the gravel lot for ParkWise to manage.
Ironically, leaving the former bank site open, without a building, was also the vision of a downtown plan the city commissioned more than 20 years ago.
That was the “Downtown Retail Refinement Plan” commissioned by CARA, the downtown urban renewal district. The plan envisioned CARA buying the bank property and turning it into something called “Albany Plaza.”
The “refinement plan” had various other elements that were never carried out. But maybe the Albany Plaza, a central open space downtown, will come about after all. (hh)
The Retail Refinement Plan of 2011 showed the “Albany Plaza” where Wells Fargo Bank was at the time.
Well done.
Hope the City will do likewise with the City owned property across from Calapooia Brewing.
Unlike the Wells Fargo lot, this parcel was given to the City by the railroad for FREE, so by comparison no taxpayer screwing incurred.
must be fun to spend tax payer money. our local government needs to stay out of development projects.
Pretty expensive parking lot for the taxpayers since the all-wise Council paid about a million and a half dollars for it and sold it to Lepman (their guy!) for less than half a million. So, if Parkwise takes it over, that probably means they will rent out all the spaces and the public won’t have any parking spaces there. Come on…there’s no alternate “deal” waiting in the wings to snap up that parking lot. The electrical in the alley adjacent has to be fixed. That is what Lepman found out and why he is backing off. Besides Lepman owns a lot of Albany’s commercial property. He doesn’t need the Wells Fargo lot.
HI Hasso, I found an old article (https://hh-today.com/old-history-its-not-all-that-old/) you posted that has specific interest to me and my family. You wrote about the Orleans Cemetery and chapel on Riverside Dr. My family (McMorris) was part of that pioneer town before and after its destruction in the Great Flood of 1862. My great aunt, who lived in an old house across (south of) Hwy 34 belonged to that small church and was its caretaker for many years. She even had the old pump church-organ in her home. She (Viola) and her husband (Edgar) are long gone. But their work continues on. We would like to keep the memory of Orleans alive. Thank you for writing about it a few years ago. Maybe you can revisit it and find more stories to tell from that cemetery.
Oh my….no taxpayer screwing incurred….Poor ole Wells fargo took the money & ran..