Pine City Council agrees to move forward with hotel project for 315 Main Street property in 3-2 vote
- wcmpnews
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
The Pine City Council agreed to move forward with a hotel project proposed by Solutions Real Estate Group for the 315 Main Street property in a split 3-2 vote on Wednesday.
On March 13, two developers shared proposals for the property.
SRE presented two concepts: A boutique hotel with 37 rooms, and a short-term rental concept with 28 units.
JCF Properties shared plans for 64 units of apartment housing, with 12 to 15 units dedicated as short-term rentals.
At Wednesday's meeting, Pine County Economic Development Coordinator Lezlie Sauter said the 315 Main Street work group evaluated both options as viable.
"You are fortunate to have two really good proposals in front of you," Sauter said. "We had a lot of naysayers who didn't think we'd get any."
Council member Dan Swanson made the motion to move forward with the hotel concept presented by SRE.
"I tend to favor one over the other, for the simple fact that one is a plug-and-play process, if you will, and one is going to take a lot of cooperation and doing with the city," Swanson said. "Zoning and parking variances and construction, there's just a lot more at stake and a lot more that would have to happen."
Swanson and council members Gina Pettie and Dave Hill voted in favor of moving forward with the SRE project. Mayor Kent Bombard and council member Kyle Palmer were the dissenting votes.
Solutions Real Estate Group is working in conjunction with ESG, a Minneapolis-based architecture and design firm, and New History, which specializes in reusing historic buildings.
At the March 13 presentation, ESG's Gretchen Camp, who would serve as project manager, said the project would likely require about six months for design, and a three-to-five month review process to qualify for the federal historic tax credit.
“This building has a lot of great historic bones to it, and we really want to respect that, but we also want to weave in the local story of Pine City, the history here and the context,” Camp explained.
Camp said the construction process would likely start in spring of 2026, with a 12-to-18 month schedule.
Jacob Kruse, president of Solutions Real Estate Group, estimated the total development cost of the project between $65,000 to over $100,000 per room, for a total between $2 and $3 million.
SRE offered Pine City $100,000 for the property. Sauter said JCF Properties offered $1, but acknowledged a willingness to negotiate a sales price with the city.
Sauter said the next step in the process would be to draft purchase and development agreements, which will go to the council for approval.
Palmer raises transparency concerns
Pine City issued a request for proposals from developers interested in the 315 Main Street property on Oct. 18, 2024, with a Feb. 3 submission deadline.
Sauter explained that two proposals were received by the deadline, with a third coming in on Feb. 13.
One developer pulled a proposal from consideration on Feb. 21 due to other project commitments.
Sauter confirmed that one of the two options discussed at Wednesday's meeting came in on Feb. 13.
Palmer expressed concerns that information from the proposals that met the Feb. 3 deadline could have been passed along to another party.
"I really worry that information was passed on to another party to make it maybe a little more favorable by council," Palmer said. "And I always have concerns that we're putting things out for proposal, saying hey, we're going to do this, and if we don't get the proposal we want, we should come back as a council and put it out. I feel like information was passed along, and that is not transparency, in my opinion, on how the city should be operating."
Swanson said reopening the RFP was an option for the 315 Main Street work group.
"With the work group, when we set the RFP ... we were more interested in getting proposals and the date when we set it wasn't a hard and fast date of Feb. 3," Swanson said. "If the work group received the proposals that we were hoping for, then we could move forward, but if we didn't have what we wanted, then we could take longer."
Before the vote, Palmer, who clarified that he was not part of the work group and did not know which party missed the Feb. 3 deadline, stressed that the city "should operate under very clear and transparent accountability."
"I don't think that this builds the best long-term partnerships with how we deal with individuals who make proposals," he said.
