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South Bend edevelopment Commission Regular Mee ing - December 4, 1981 9. NEXT COMMISSION MEETING (continued) Mr. Voo de: All along I have maintained that I can't pretend to pass myself off as an expert and, obviously, you haVE done two to three years work on this and we have just come in at the eleventh hour at the bidding of someone who said, hey, wait a minute, I think it can be done So, I am not going to pretend to say that they are abs lutely right and you're absolutely wrong, but there did seem to be a couple of questions, namely , whether or not there was a compelling reason to bring it down now, you may think that from a liability standpoint there is. The other question was, that no one answered, was also TRANSPO going to lose there money if the 90 -day extensi n was granted. Mr. f1cM hon: I think that the comment that's been made by TRAM PO as far as they are extremely concerned about their grant and feel that they have to move forward as fast as possible for fear of losing their money, because they ha e no control over what happens in Washington, what is rescinded and what is grandfathered through. They arE extremely concerned about not moving ahead, and if the dd Fellows area could not be included in the area considered by TRANSPO, then it would have to be submitted with so e other area. One of the considerations that we offered for the Commission to consider was that we felt that that area was the best area for TRANSPO to be located in light of the future development of Century Mall and to make thE balance of the parcel most attractive to invest- ment. 1he question or comment made earlier that, I be- lieve My. Brademas said, certainly there's no question that 20C workers would have an impact on rehab, we cer- tainly agree with that. That's the whole reason that we're tying to market the block and we feel that from an office and retail standpoint that Rouse was correct in their original recommendation and they have restated that recently to us that the bus terminal should be along Washington Street. The Washington Street location did pose some problems to TRANSPO without exposure to Main Street, and if the Odd Fellows Building was to come down, that resolved that problem. If the Odd Fellows Building stayed Lp, we would have had to work around it in some other manner. Your article on renovation of buildings in Chicago is great and it's very accurate, but I would like to note one paragraph. It says here that that space goes for a 82 -100 dollars a square foot, and I can assure you that is not South Bend's market and those buildings were not being saved in Chicago either until it got Lp into that area for a while. 38