When the Buffalo Street project is completed, the road north of Fort Wayne Street will be dramatically different. “Obviously, it will be a contrast to the current Buffalo Street view, but it will be a very good contrast and it will accomplish a lot of our goals,” City Planner Jeremy Skinner said in an interview Tuesday afternoon. “Our goal is to strengthen the downtown to continue to invest in the downtown so that we can turn our investment into private dollar investments; so with our $2 million investment we’re hoping to entice private investment of $20 million-plus. That’s always been the end goal of any project we do, to couple our investment with the investment of private developers. Obviously, with strengthening the downtown, our intent is to induce higher-density residential to create the future users of downtown amenities.” The project started about six or seven years ago, with the city originally looking at reconstructing Buffalo Street back around 2009. Preliminary engineering work had been done on reconstructing the former boulevard and addressing sewer, storm water and road issues. About the same time, the city had been in discussions with Indiana American Water Co. about its building on Buffalo Street next to Canal Street. The water company was looking at building a new plant and vacating the Buffalo Street plant, so the city was in contact with IAWC about what it wanted to see with the building. Warsaw contemplated putting a new city hall at that location, but then the First National Bank building on the corner of Center and Buffalo streets became available. It was determined that remodeling the bank building was more cost effective than constructing a new building at the IAWC location. “Which meant we still wanted to do something down there. We began looking at options for redevelopment of that corridor,” Skinner said, whether that was mixed use or higher residential. The city began acquiring property in the area, with the first property purchased either in 2007 or 2009, Skinner estimated. As other properties became available, the city started acquiring them, too. Then about two years ago, Skinner said they talked about placing a mixed use building where the old water company plant is and some redevelopment of residential property on Buffalo Street. After Mayor Joe Thallemer had been to a presentation in South Bend ran by Michiana Area Council on Government, he learned of a developer named Dave Matthews who had worked on some higher-end residential properties up there. “We went up and looked at some of his projects. We liked the idea of what he was doing there, and then invited him down to look at what we’ve been working on to see if he had any interest in doing a similar project in Warsaw as he had done up there. Obviously, he was pretty interested in our project and it kind of took off from there,” Skinner recalled. But down at the state level, there was some rancor with tax increment finance districts. “They were changing rules on TIF districts,” Skinner said, with the city of Carmel having arguments over them, leading to some new laws and regulations. “Part of those new regulations were the original TIF districts that were created in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At the time when they instituted those rules and regulations around those TIF districts, they didn’t have any time constraints.” Going forward in the mid-’90s and late 2000s, the state put a time constraint on the life of TIF districts, which it changed over time. “So the early, what they called legacy TIFs, didn’t have any time restrictions. They never expired. Through enough complaining and whining and in-fighting in Carmel and a few other places in Indiana, there was enough of a push from state legislatures to change that rule so that they arbitrarily were instituting an expiration date on the old legacy TIFs, which was our downtown TIF,” Skinner stated. Warsaw’s downtown TIF was what helped get the Zimmer headquarters on Main Street and Central Park built. “While we’re working on what we wanted to do here, they’re passing rules and regulations that were going to impact what we were trying to do,” Skinner said. “So through that, it pushed us to expediate what we were working on, which is why we did the Buffalo Street bond issue last year.” Doing the bond issue in 2015 extended the life of the TIF district through 2040. The bond issue was for the reconstruction of the infrastructure. There will be portions of private funding from the developer for the residential portion of the project. Skinner said it is hoped that funding from the Northeast Regional Cities partnership will be provided as it was on the project list presented to the state. That funding will help with the plaza portion of the project and other items. The Buffalo Street project will include a mix of residential development. On the east side will be what developer Matthews calls “city homes.” They will be like town homes but with a detached garage. The units will be about 20 feet wide and stacked in seven or eight units per structure, with common shared walls. The alley west of Buffalo and the first alley north of Fort Wayne will be the western and southern boundaries of the project. On the other side of Buffalo will be town homes and mews, which is “kind of like a small town home,” Skinner said. If a town home is 3,200 square feet, a mew is about 1,200 square feet. He said there won’t be much difference between the city homes and town homes, other than the detached garage. “I believe the intent on all of these is that they will be saleable units. They won’t be rentals,” Skinner stated. While the numbers could change, he said preliminary numbers indicate there will be 10 city homes, 19 row houses and 35 mews. Condos will depend on the number of stories of the building, and could vary from 20 to 60. A public plaza will be furthest north on Buffalo Street near the lake. It will “connect” the lake to the mixed-use building that will go where the IAW Company was. “The mixed used building is not completely set in stone as to what it will be other than it will be a combination, whether that will be office, commercial, might have a restaurant, might have some office space, might have a residential office or commercial,” Skinner said. Space in the mixed-use building will be leased. The mixed-use building won’t be in the first part of the project. As for the roads, Skinner said, “Mostly it will just be the reconstruction of Buffalo Street, the extension of Indiana (Street) as it wraps around to Buffalo and then the reconstruction of the west alley into a brick paved alley. And then there will some work to the access drive, but not a whole lot.” Since Buffalo used to be a boulevard, it is very wide, and if anything will be shrunk down in size. There will be parking on both sides of the road. It will be a lot like Market Street, Skinner said, in that parking will be defined and there will be bump outs. The Indiana Street extension won’t affect the Central Beach area, but will take some of the park area out but should be about less than a half acre, if that, Skinner said. The extension will not only help with increased residences, but also with the traffic flow from the mixed-used building. There will be on-street parking for that part of Indiana Street, with the public plaza tied into that and the park. “We’re kind of reconstructing this linear park corridor with a public plaza,” he said. The plaza is still in the planning stages, but the intent would be that it would have some type of interactive fountain and some type of art. There will be space for people to sit, eat or read near the lake. Sewer and storm water will be improved as part of the project. “We have had sanitary issues down here for some time. It is an old line. From a maintenance standpoint, it is a nightmare obviously, so we’re hoping to address those issues with a new line,” Skinner said. “Obviously a new line will be put in to accommodate the new development so it’ll be a whole new package as far as the sanitary sewer. The storm sewer has been an issue for even a longer time probably.” Solutions to alleviate flooding in Central Park are being worked on by the city engineer and storm water utility as it relates to the project. Skinner said his intent is to bid out and construct the Buffalo Street project this year. He hopes the design will be done in the next couple of months, with bid letting in the early spring and construction completed before winter. Once completed, it is hoped the Buffalo Street project spurs on other developments. “With all redevelopment projects, it is the intent that that redevelopment project generate other projects. Whether it’s necessarily here or in proximity to the downtown, it’ll always be our goal to continue to improve the downtown and create opportunities for redevelopment projects,” Skinner said. “We hope that this is our attempt to entice people to continue to develop and buy into the downtown and redevelop the downtown. So we’re hoping that other projects will come out of this. For the time being, this is the project we’re working on now. We have some other things and ideas we’ll be working on in the future but they’re not developed to the point that this project is.”
