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BY JACK KEEFE

In print | Published February 21, 2008

This weekend, Vice President of Facilities Stu Hain will present to the Board of Managers the most recent results of the committee that has been meeting to discuss the prospects of constructing a “Swarthmore Inn” complex near the softball field. The committee will recommend pursuing the plans of one developer — the Goldenberg Group — as the project moves forward. The project, if eventually approved for construction, is estimated to cost at least $40 million and to be completed in 2011 or 2012.

The plans of the two developers who presented proposals to the committee centered on developing not just hotel rooms (the “inn” itself), but also retail space, residential complexes, a restaurant with a liquor license and extended parking. In addition, all plans made use of the roughly three-acre plot in between the train station and the Palmer, Pittenger and Roberts dormitories, intersecting with both the softball field and the C Lot parking area.

“[The Goldenberg Group] demonstrated by the way they presented to us, by the people they’ve involved in their plan so far that they’ve paid much more careful attention to what the town and the college are looking for. They’ve had a very strong environmentally sustainable component to the plan,” Hain said.

In Hain’s opinion, the Goldenberg planned focused more on the hotel and retail component of the plan (as opposed to the other plan, which had a primary focus on the residential component). This positively influenced the committee’s opinion of the Goldenberg plan.

Swarthmore Borough Manager Jane Billings also observed that the Goldenberg group was much more “fascinated than repelled” by the idea of proactively involving students from the college in the discussion concerning the inn’s construction.

“We felt that they [understood] Swarthmore, and that they would definitely work with every facet of the community we could think of, including students, faculty, staff at the college and the residents of Swarthmore,” Billings said. “Goldenberg got more of the mix about [what would complement Swarthmore] … They decided to make more of Swarthmore, rather than [make] a different Swarthmore.”

Unique elements of the Goldenberg Group’s plans include an underground rather than above-ground parking complex and space for a small “art-house” style cinema that would be part of the inn complex. At the moment, however, not many details are finalized in the proposal — for example, the exact number of rooms that will be in the inn (at least 63, at most 80) — but light contours to the proposal have already been drawn.

For example, tentative conceptions of the Goldenberg plan consider whether or not the developer should shift existing traffic patterns on Chester Road to pull pedestrian and automotive traffic into the retail areas.

The details of the retail space itself are also loosely defined — Hain said that neither the committee nor the Goldenberg group was looking for “big box” retail, such as Old Navy, K-Mart and the like, to go in the space.

“Developers have done their market research and see there are opportunities for market retail [in the Ville] … of what sort, I don’t know [yet],” said Peter Gardner ’08, a member of the committee and Student Council president. Billings hoped that any retail that would come with the inn complex would not only be successful in and of itself, but that it would help revitalize existing commercial establishments in the Ville.

While the residential units being planned for will be “consistent with the market year and … the style of the town,” Hain said that it was more or less up in the air whether or not the units would be marketed as apartments or condominiums.

Another component of the plan is a large bookstore, currently drawn in for roughly 15,000 square feet. In this respect, Hain referred to a trend of other colleges such as Grinnel, Dartmouth and Vassar moving their bookstores into the local town. “It’s pretty common now for the college to be focused on the town and the quality of the life in the town — for both the faculty and the students,” Hain said.

“There are pros and cons … the conversation has been ongoing,” Gardner said. “No [final decisions] have been made yet. Where it stands now is that over the course of the next few months, this committee will continue to meet to mash together the pros and cons and the details, and go from there.”

Funding for the project, if it continues to receive approval from the Board of Managers, will come from three sources: the Borough of Swarthmore, the college and the developer itself. The brunt of the capital necessary to begin and complete the project, however, will come through the developer from external investors who are attracted to the project.

According to Billings, there is money available from a host of grant programs at the state level that the Borough can tap into to fund the project.

“The state has tried to commit money to projects that are reusing infrastructure rather than creating new developments in green fields,” she said.

The Goldenberg group’s initial expected contribution from the Borough government was approximately $5 million, a figure Billings called “aggressive.”

However, as Billings noted, the Borough did receive around $1.5 million for the reconstruction of the Ville’s sidewalk and street lamp system two years ago, so the Borough has been “encouraged so far in its conversations with the state.”

As for the college, there will be an undisclosed financial risk that the committee will “try to minimize so as to have as little burden as possible.”

“We may, in the end, wind up with no burden,” Hain said. The college will continue to own the land, which the developer will lease from the college for an amount of time that will likely be at least 60 years, according to Hain.

During this time, the college would receive rent for the land, and after the end of the lease period all of the improvements made on the land would revert to full ownership by the college.

Contrary to some of the ideas that had been floated in previous discussions of the inn, portions of the Crum Woods will not be used to make up for the loss of athletic space that the construction of the inn complex will cause.

According to Hain, past expansions of other athletic spaces mean that the softball field can more-or-less be relocated to an area between the proposed driveway into the inn complex and PPR.

If the Board of Managers approves the committee’s suggestion to pursue the Goldberg Group’s plan, the next set of questions the committee will address will be primarily derived from financial interests.

Namely, the subsequent discussion will seek to answer how elements of the proposal, such as the rerouting of traffic and the nature of the bookstore and residential units will or will not have solutions that are feasible within the economic constraints of the borough, college and developer.

Currently, the only student members of the committee are Gardner and Student Council Vice President Sven David Udekwu.

Among issues Gardner expects to raise with the plan is the question of whether the inn complex will change the relationship between students and the police. “If a private hotel official runs into a drunk student, are they going to be calling the police or Public Safety?” Gardner said, explaining that the complex would run along a major path toward Pittenger, Palmer, Roberts, Mary Lyon and Strath Haven.

“We don’t want students to feel like this is something that didn’t have student input or approval … Not everyone will be happy about it, but we want to get all the input we can,” Gardner said.

Although the inn proposal will lead to the elimination of the C lot student parking area, Hain said that the Goldenberg plan provides for enough parking to at least make up for the loss of C Lot and to provide for estimated commercial traffic. Also, temporary parking solutions would be provided when the construction starts.

“We’ll have a more formal conversation about [the Inn complex] when there are much less vague ideas — when something is coming together,” Udekwu said.

Billings indicated that, under the assumption that the discussion with the Goldenberg group will continue, there will begin to be open forums wherein the committee will communicate with the Swarthmore community on the topic of the inn.

To an extent, the conversation is already beginning — a recent letter sent to the Swarthmorean by Susan Wright, who according to Billings used to serve on the inn planning committee, exhorted against the current extension of past zoning proposals applied to the plot of land where the inn would be placed.

Initially, the zoning allowed for at most an 80-room inn and 8,000 square feet of retail. “This project is frankly bigger,” Billings said.

“Luckily for all of us, it’s a very public process — so we’ll know [what people think] when the plan gets presented,” she said.

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