If you’re a fan of long legal battles and arcane architectural and construction details, your Super Bowl might be on the way.
An exhausting three-and-a-half-hour Urban Conservation Board hearing on the fate of downtown’s Dennison Building June 16 ended with cheers from preservationists.
But that hearing — which capped months of maneuvering, rescheduled hearings, testimony and protests — looks unlikely to end the battle over the 124-year-old building, a controversial fight that could go all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court. There are a lot of steps to go through before that can happen, but Dennison owners the Joseph family say they’re ready to exhaust all legal options. The next move for the influential family of automobile dealers: appealing to the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals, which considers certain zoning disputes for the city.
The conservation board denied an application to demolish the Dennison, at 716 Main St., by the Josephs’ real estate company Columbia REI, LLC, citing the company’s failure to prove it was an economic hardship to redevelop the building in one of downtown’s historic districts. The battle over the Dennison has come to represent how the city will navigate tensions between downtown growth and preserving Cincinnati’s historic urban fabric.
The June 16 hearing was preservationists’ turn to argue against the building’s demolition following a previous four-hour hearing May 26 during which lawyers Francis Barrett and Tim Burke presented the Joseph family’s case.
The board’s decision, which temporarily headed off the possibly precedent-setting demolition of a contested building in a protected historic district, will now set off another round of legal wrangling. Should the appeals board side with preservationists, the next step would be the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas. From there, the Josephs could appeal all the way up to the state’s highest court.
Hanging in the balance, some say, is the way the city deals with its historic architecture, which preservationists and city officials alike cite as one of Cincinnati’s biggest assets.
Four members of the seven-member zoning appeals board — Reginald Lyons, Emily Supinger, Michael Sweeney and Mark McKilip — were appointed by previous City Manager Milton Dohoney. Two others, Michael Moran, and Robert Zielasko, were appointed by current City Manager Harry Black. Zielasko also serves on the Historic Conservation Board and voted to deny the Dennison demolition permit. A seventh member of the board is drawn from the city’s planning commission on a rotating basis. Columbia’s appeal will hinge on the record produced by previous hearings before the Historic Conservation Board, making those hours-long slogs through witnesses and documents all the more vital.
Looking back over those hearings gives a glimpse into the evidence the appeals board would consider.
The Josephs, an influential Cincinnati family that runs a number of car dealerships in the region, say it’s too expensive to rehabilitate the building. The group’s critics say that’s not the case — an assertion echoed by the city’s urban conservator, Beth Johnson. Preservationists argue that Columbia bought the building with plans to demolish it, a move that is against historic preservation rules.
The Josephs say they bought the building to protect the value of other investments they have in the area, namely a number of parking lots surrounding the Dennison. In past filings around the application, the Josephs have indicated they were motivated to purchase the property to prevent it from becoming affordable housing. They say they’d now like to develop the site as the potential home of an as-yet-unidentified Fortune 500 company.
At the previous May 26 hearing, attorneys for the Josephs laid out their case. That meeting had its fair share of contention: Columbia attorney Barrett moved to have Johnson’s testimony stricken from the proceedings. Barrett said that Johnson has shown “extreme prejudice and bias” and that the Josephs “have a stacked deck against us going in” to the demolition application
Johnson wrote a report taking staunch issue with the Josephs’ assertion that anything other than demolishing the building would present the company with an economic hardship, pointing out the building’s sound structural condition and the fact that studies on the economic feasibility of redevelopment of the building didn’t take into account historic state tax credits and other incentives.
Lance Brown, the executive vice president of Beck Consulting, which drew up the economic feasibility report, told the board that no normal type of use — apartments, condos, office space — was feasible for the Dennison. However, when pushed by the board, Brown admitted he wasn’t specifically familiar with incentives like state historic preservation tax credits, LEED tax credits or city grants and tax credits that could have made the project more feasible.
Most of the presentation restated the key points of this assertion in greater detail, but there was at least one new revelation: how the Cincinnati City Center Development Corporation, which purchased the building for $1.2 million and then sold it to Columbia for $740,000, recouped money on the deal. Representatives for the Joseph family say the group paid 3CDC further development costs after the initial sale, making up the missing money.
Columbia opponents argue other developers could rehab the building. Paul Muller of the Cincinnati Preservation Association said at the June 16 hearing that the preservation association has eight letters from interested developers. But the Dennison’s owners say the building isn’t for sale. Because the Dennison, which was built in 1892 by the firm of noted architect Samuel Hannaford, sits within the Cincinnati East Manufacturing and Warehouse District, one of 29 historic districts in the city, special permission is needed to demolish it.
Plenty of barbs flew back and forth during that three-and-a-half-hour hearing leading up to the board’s decision. Attorney Sean Suder, who represents preservationists looking to save the building, dueled attorneys Burke and Barrett, who represent Columbia and its owners the Joseph family, on a number of points, including the relevancy and availability of state and federal historic preservation tax credits, the building’s historic significance, its present condition, whether rehabilitation costs cited by Columbia were accurate and more.
A number of witnesses testified on behalf of the building’s historic significance and the economic feasibility of saving it.
Kathleen Norris, a Cincinnati real estate consultant, reviewed the report commissioned by the Josephs that purported to show there was no economically advantageous way to rehabilitate the building into office space, a luxury hotel, condominiums or apartments.
Norris took issue with that last conclusion, saying that a “tremendous shortage of market rate apartments in the Central Business District” and the coming streetcar, which has a stop just a few blocks from the building, would make it very attractive to renters and allow rents as high as $2.80 per square foot. That’s similar to market rates for apartments at riverfront development The Banks.
“The fact that the Dennison isn’t The Banks is an asset, not a detriment,” Harris said, heading off rebuttal about the difference between the mid-downtown location and the riverfront. Harris said some renters would want a less-active location than the commercial and entertainment destination.
John Blatchford, of Over-the-Rhine-based Kunst, which does tax credit consultancy, said he reviewed data about the building’s tax credit eligibility and said it was “possible and highly likely” that a project to rehabilitate the Dennison could net as much as $1.4 million in federal and $900,000 in state historic tax credits.
Barrett and Burke pugnaciously cross-examined most of the preservationists’ experts, and the intense atmosphere spilled over into the public comment segment of the hearing, during which both Burke and Barrett cross examined citizens speaking in support of efforts to preserve the building.
“I don’t think I need a geography lesson,” Over-the-Rhine Community Council President Martha Good snapped at the attorneys when they questioned her about why OTRCC was interested in a downtown building.
For Good, the battle over the Dennison is about more than a single building. She argued that a demolition permit for the Dennison would set a precedent that could endanger other historic buildings around Cincinnati. OTRCC has voted unanimously to oppose the demolition permit.
Following the board’s decision to deny Columbia’s demolition permit application, the company has 30 days to appeal the decision, a move attorneys for the Josephs say they will make. ©
