Lincoln Haymarket business owners are forming a group to seek changes to the proposed elevation

A group of Haymarket businesses has announced plans to formally protest a downtown skyscraper project.

The members, who call themselves the Lincoln Haymarket Business Association, said they want a seat at the table in the city’s negotiations with the developers of the Lincoln Bold project, a 22-story, mixed-use building at Ninth and P streets northwest.

Russ Baier, who owns a building in Haymarket, said that while the development team has approached many business owners individually, “we want this organization to approach them as a group.”

Although the group has some long-term plans, the most important thing right now is to fight and negotiate with Lincoln Bold, said Matt Taylor, owner of Tavern on the Square and The Other Room.

Lincoln Bold wants to build a 254-foot-tall building that will include 36,000 square feet of office space on floors 2-5, 70 luxury apartment units on floors 7-15 and 33 condos on floors 16-21.

Taylor said the group’s main concerns are parking, road closures and the overall economic impact of the project on Haymarket businesses. One estimate puts the estimated 24- to 30-month construction timeline at more than $12 million in losses for businesses close to the project.

Dan Sloan, who owns The Mill Coffee & Tea with his wife Tamara, said the project will impact Haymarket business owners “beautifully” in the short term and long term after construction.

“We want to make sure our interests are recognized,” he said.

Taylor said the group’s main goal is to get the developers to relocate the project, possibly to a city-owned lot at 10th and M streets.

“The easiest thing is to move the project,” said Taylor, although this is impossible.

“We don’t want to kill the project,” Taylor said. “We want to move the project. If we can’t move the project, we want to work with the developers.”

Steve Glenn, one of the members of the development team, said he has worked with the businesses and is willing to move forward, but Lincoln Bold is not interested in moving the project.

Glenn said the developers have proposed charging Haymarket visitors for valet parking during construction, and there have been talks to close a small portion of P Street to impact fewer businesses.

But he believes that some opponents are fake and that people have the intention of delaying the project, “hoping that they will kill the project.”

Taylor says that’s not the case, but he and his co-workers feel left out of the process, none of whom knew about it until the Journal Star ran a story last fall.

He cited the fact that no one from the public spoke at a Nov. 2 Lincoln-Lancaster County Planning Commission hearing as evidence that the developers and the city were not transparent and failed to inform those affected.

Business owners also complained that the project is set to receive more than $24 million in tax reform financing, the most money any project has received in Lincoln history.

Many have questioned why a project that includes luxury housing should receive millions of dollars in city tax incentives.

Most of the money will pay for landscaping costs at what is now a gas station, but several million dollars will go toward sidewalks, streets and other improvements to the Haymarket. The project will contribute more than $700,000 to the city’s affordable housing fund.

City Development Director Dan Marvin said the site’s owner currently pays $8,900 a year in property taxes. Once the 20-year TIF payback period is over, the projected property taxes will be about $2 million a year.

“That doesn’t sound like a bad deal to me,” Marvin said. “This seems like a good deal for taxpayers.”

The TIF money is the only reason the developers need to submit the plan to the city for approval beyond obtaining a building permit.

Because they wanted a TIF, they had to go through several stages of review, appearing in hearings before the City Design Committee, the Historic Preservation Commission, the Planning Commission and the City Council.

“This is a really big project for our city,” Glenn said. “I’m proud of this project.”

The project is scheduled for a hearing before the City Council on March 6, and members of the Lincoln Haymarket Business Association said they will attend the meeting.