Back to beginning for historic home with restaurant plans
Developer will deed Boynton property back to the CRA.
BOYNTON BEACH — The contentious back-and-forth that has played out over the past several months between the Community Redevelopment Agency and the developer to whom it sold the historic Oscar Magnuson home appears to have finally come to an end.
Shovel Ready Projects will deed the property at 211 E. Ocean Ave. back to the CRA, according to an email sent from CRA director Mike Simon to the CRA board. And the CRA will refund Shovel Ready the $255,000 the company paid for the site more than two years ago.
The bad news: It’s back to square one for the property that was supposed to have been turned into a restaurant by now.
The good news: Shovel Ready agreeing to deed the property back to the CRA should relieve the agency of pursuing a lawsuit against the company, an option that was very much on the table.
“Congratulations,” Simon wrote to the CRA board, which is also the city commission, in a July 12 email.
The update came as good news to the CRA board after a spirited exchange at the July 10 CRA board meeting with Shovel Ready’s attorney, Tom Carney, of Delray Beach. At that meeting, Commissioner Joe Casello, concerned about why the deed hadn’t already been returned back to the CRA per contract, asked Carney if he was holding the board “hostage.” And Commissioner Justin Katz, frustrated with Carney and Shovel Ready’s performance and disappointments through this all, said, “If the lies could build that property, it would be 10 stories tall.”
By the end of that discussion, the majority of the board voted to go to court to get the property’s deed back. Mayor Steven Grant and Commissioner Mack McCray voted against it.
Now, the CRA board will discuss what to do next with the property, likely at the August meeting.
Grant said the board will decide whether they even want to do anything because of the timing of the Town Square redevelopment project and costs associated with it. The CRA expects to spend about $3.7 million in 20182019 for the Town Square project, which will bring a new City Hall, library, fire station, apartments, a hotel, parking garages, an amphitheater and a cultural center at the historic high school.
The CRA sold the Magnuson house to Shovel Ready around the same time it sold the Ruth Jones Cottage at 480 E. Ocean Ave. to a separate entity with plans for both to be developed into restaurants. The two restaurants were to help bring development to the downtown area.
Neither have opened, but development — about $500 million of it — has come, either underway or approved, for the downtown area including the Town Square project.
The tension between the CRA board and Shovel Ready escalated publicly when the latter failed to meet the May 14 deadline to get a building permit. The CRA notified Shovel Ready they had to deed the property back within 30 days. Shovel Ready responded with two options: They asked for an extension to do the project, and if the board didn’t want that, they’d give the deed back but wanted $50,000 from the CRA for money spent on the building, in addition to the refunded $255,000 purchase price.
The board failed to reach an agreement on how to proceed at the June CRA meeting. They planned to discuss it again at the July meeting and were thinking of refunding Shovel Ready the money spent on “hard costs” up to $50,000, at the request of Vice Mayor Chris- tina Romelus. Commissioner Katz called it a “$50,000 tax payer participation trophy.”
At the July meeting, Romelus said Carney failed to show “hard costs” and said she could no longer support Shovel Ready. She joined Casello and Katz in voting to proceed with a lawsuit.
Then came the July 12 email.