Huber Heights City Council approved the contract at the Monday night meeting. The consultant will receive $5,000 per month for six months, or $30,000. This contract can be extended with city manager or city council approval.
In the previous contract with the city, Joo was paid $4,000 for consulting services. The city also paid Joo $20,000 which he then put down as “earnest money” for the property the city tried to, and eventually did, buy on Brandt Pike. He was a “pass through” for those funds, Schommer said.
Joo was also paid $56,000 for his services when the city bought the Marian Shopping Center land.
Schommer said the city is hiring Joo to help strategize what else needs to be done to bring in developers or end users for the land. Schommer said Joo will also evaluate if the city should consider buying more land on Brandt Pike.
Joo will be paid for bringing deals to the table, Schommer said.
The contract also states that if the city enters into a third party agreement on any of the Brandt Pike property that the consultant will either get an acquisition fee or a development fee. The city has agreed to pay a 4% acquisition fee and/or a half percent of the development project budget agreed to by the city and the developer.
City council approved the measure unanimously.
Huber Heights bought the land the Marian Shopping Center sits on for $2.8 million. The city bought adjacent land from Premier Health for $520,000. The Premier Health land is about 17 acres. The shopping center is on the 6100 block of Brandt Pike, one of the busiest roads in the city.
Huber Heights is working with the tenants of the shopping center to relocate their businesses elsewhere in the city. Schommer said the city will not be evicting or displacing any tenant of the Marian Shopping Center.
The land on Brandt Pike is part of project No. 2 for the city’s Transformational Economic Development (TED) program, which the city started last fall.
The city has budgeted $3.8 million to buy the land, perform market studies or environmental studies and other procedures that would prepare the site for redevelopment.
The city’s first project in the TED program was buying 52 acres of land at the corner of Executive Boulevard and Brandt Pike. The city hired a Chicago-based consulting firm to conduct a study to determine the best use for the land, which recently returned its findings and is working on attracting developers to the site.
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