Enwin considering offers for downtown office building

Enwin has confirmed it has received offers for its 1950s-era downtown office building. “We are reviewing them right now,” CEO Helga Reidel said Tuesday, though she declined to reveal little else of the proposals made for its Ouellette Avenue building. Enwin wants to sell it and consolidate its office operation at its Rhodes Drive operation centre in a money-saving move to streamline its operation.

The move would involve almost 100 staff leaving the downtown, something the Downtown Windsor Business Improvement Association has opposed.

The final day for the electric utility to receive offers was Friday. Now it will be up to the Enwin board and ultimately city council to decide on whether to accept one of the offers, Reidel said. Those decisions will be made in camera.

When Enwin announced in November it was putting the building up for sale, Reidel emphasized that Enwin’s board wouldn’t just leave and allow its building to become a vacant, unused shell. It wanted a buyer with a “good alternative use.” She wouldn’t discuss what the bidders want to do with the threestorey, 40,000-square-foot building, located at Ouellette and Elliott Street. The downtown building was originally the home of the Windsor Utilities Commission, which runs the municipal water system. Enwin now manages WUC. Enwin says the Rhodes Drive centre was originally built to house all its employees. It has kept employees downtown in an oversized building despite that plan.

With a renewed interest in the downtown by investors, Enwin felt the time was right to sell the downtown building. If Enwin does move out of the downtown, it hopes to set up some sort of customer service kiosk in the core to service downtown customers.