An Ohio-based company that builds shopping centers has been in talks with Bainbridge Island city officials on a proposal to develop a retail center and medical office building at Highway 305 and NE High School Road.
Visconsi Companies of Pepper Pike, Ohio has submitted preliminary plans that include six new retail buildings, a bank and a health care office building on the property.
Company officials are being tight-lipped about the project.
“It’s way too premature to discuss anything,” Bradley Goldberg, director of development for Visconsi Companies, said in an email Tuesday.
Visconsi Companies’ forte is community shopping centers, and the firm has completed more than 80 projects across the country that include Walgreens drug store locations.
The company’s current projects, according to the firm’s website, include new Staples stores in Iowa City, Iowa and Woodbury, Minn.; a Home Depot in Ashland, Ohio; and a Super Walmart and Sam’s Club in Bismark, N.D.
According to an email in the project file at city hall, the company has prospective tenants for the development. Those are not detailed in the company’s submittals to the city.
City officials, however, have been told that the company hopes to have Bartell Drugs as an anchor tenant.
Representatives from Visconsi Companies have met with the city’s Design Review Board for initial feedback on the project.
A development application has not yet been submitted to the city, however.
“The design review board is very pleased that a developer is reviewing their ideas, seeking input, from the Design Review Board prior to finally defining their project and making an application, which then brings it to the design review board,” said Alan Grainger, vice chairman of the board.
No additional meetings with the Design Review Board have been scheduled.
According to drawings submitted to the city, five of the six retail buildings would be 5,000 square feet in size; the sixth structure would cover nearly 1.5 acres with a 15,645-square-foot building, parking, a drive-through and other amenities.
The proposed bank is 3,300 square feet in size; the medical building would be two stories high and include 8,000-square-feet of space on both floors.
The total amount of
building space is nearly 60,000 square feet, according to a conceptual site layout plan.
The preliminary plan also calls for nearly 300 parking spaces, and includes a pathway through the project and the potential for public space within the interior of the development. The bank would front NE High School Road, and access to the development on the northeast corner of Highway 305/High School Road would be via a new road just west of the existing Kitsap Bank.
