Maloney on leasing existing stores and budget for five stores
Maloney asks if EDC considered leasing existing grocery stores and how $70M will cover five stores when La Marqueta alone costs $30M. Peck says other sites like Peninsula are tenant fit-outs, and the private site portal is open for Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.
Did you look at leasing existing grocery stores?
So we have a private site portal that's open right now for Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.
And so we encourage private owners to fill out the form to submit their property.
And it can be a former grocery store or a grocery store.
Like, you know, we're open to it.
But again, it's going to, NYC grocery stores are going to have its own look and feel.
So we want to make sure it's uniform across the five stores.
So we will still have some input.
And on the...
The budget, the original plan was 30, or sorry, 70 million for all five boroughs, 30 million going to La Marqueta.
How are we going to get to five with that budget allocation?
So the peninsula, for example, is a tenant fit out, so it's not a ground-up construction, and we anticipate with this private site portal that we will also have
sites that are sort of ready to go that are already built out in terms of the base infrastructure.
I think those are all my questions on grocery stores.
Back to the chair.
Can I, sorry, can I just ask a follow up?
So when you say third party vendors are gonna be bidding on the RFIs and the RFPs, which type of groups are you talking about?
Like who would be viable?
Current grocery store operators.
Current grocery store operators, okay.
So like food bazaars or whoever it is could also bid on those to operate?
Okay.
Because I do have a couple friends that are in that sort of industry, and so they were saying that the build-out compared to what they would pay is more, and obviously there's different reasons for that.
So that's why they were just wondering, you know, how this is going to sort of compete with some of their stores that are in the communities.
I don't know if they're necessarily right next to La Marquette or some of the other ones, but I think that there were some concerns that they had expressed about that in terms of how this would impact the local grocery store company.
So I just wanted to reiterate that point that I think there is that.
Sort of concern out there, especially when you look at the cost.
And so, yeah, just wanted to uplift that point that you had brought up, Chair.
Understood.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Okay.
Sorry, before we go into more questions, I think Councilmember Shanel Thomas-Henry, you had a few more questions, right?