Four Quarters Brewing, a growing craft beer company that started up in 2014, plans to relocate and open a taproom with capacity for up to 200 people in the former bank building at 70 Main Street in Winooski.

The craft brewer will relocate production there from its current location a few blocks away on West Canal Street. Four Quarters is preparing to boost production from the current 1,000 barrels a year to 10 times that over the next five years.

"Our distributors want a lot more beer from us," explained Brian Eckert, founder and co-owner of Four Quarters.

The taproom will serve grilled-cheese sandwiches and pizza and periodically host live music. A garage-style door will be constructed on one wall that opens onto the former KeyBank drive-through area in the summer. It will have "a big patio and a deck and lots of seating out there and a couple fire pits and Adirondack chairs,” Eckert said. 

Burlington International Airport will use a $10 million federal appropriation announced last Friday to expand its main terminal.

If all goes as planned, construction on the project will begin next fall and be completed by 2021, according to Nicolas Longo, deputy director of aviation at the airport.

The project sets up the airport “for where we're heading in the future," Longo said, and will allow the terminal to better accommodate larger aircraft now flying into BTV.

Updated at 8:27 p.m.

Once completed in 2023, CityPlace Burlington will boast 318 apartments, a rooftop restaurant, a 174-room hotel and more than 530 parking spaces.

Construction on the much-delayed project will begin in August 2020 and is expected to wrap up 30 months later.

That’s according to new documents that project majority owner Brookfield Asset Management filed with the city late last week. The Burlington City Council’s Board of Finance reviewed them at its meeting Monday night and voted to allow the city to submit a “substantial change request” to the state body that oversees the tax-increment financing program.

The memos provide the first glimpse into the new design since Brookfield unveiled its scaled-down proposal nearly a month ago. The 14-story towers in the original design, which spurred lawsuits and financial challenges, were replaced by 10-story buildings.

The submitted designs don't include plans for the former Macy's building, which was not part of the original project but is now envisioned as the future home of the University of Vermont Medical Center offices.
The memos reveal that construction costs are greatly reduced now that the project has morphed from 1 million square feet to just over 730,000. When bidding on the original project ended in May, the costs came in at $190 million. The developer attempted to reduce the price tag “but ultimately determined there were not enough savings to justify starting construction,” according to a project memo.

In July, Brookfield announced that the “scope, scale, and the timing” of construction would change.

The scaled-down design uses lighter-weight steel and is now projected to cost $120 million to build, according to the documents. It should be complete by February 2023 barring any regulatory delays or legal challenges, according to Jeff Glassberg, a liaison between city and the developers.

Assistant city attorney Richard Haesler confirmed that the new project will fall slightly short of its anticipated TIF revenues. In 2016, Burlington voters approved a $21.8 million TIF bond to fix up sidewalks and rebuild streets lost to the former Burlington Town Center mall decades ago. Such debt is meant to be repaid with additional tax revenue, known as “increment,” generated by the new project.

Glassberg wrote in a memo that TIF funds from the project will pay for the reopening of Pine and St. Paul streets and "streetscape upgrades" to parts of Cherry and Bank streets that abut the project. But early estimates show the new design will only generate $19 million in increment, Glassberg said Monday.
Mayor Miro Weinberger said the TIF shortfall may be closed by other projects in the city’s Waterfront TIF district, such as the former Macy’s building and the existing mall building that fronts Church Street. That building will remain intact as part of the redevelopment.

“We haven't reached the point where we’re concluding that $19 million is where the new budget is going to be,” the mayor said.

The city will discuss the project changes on December 19 with the Vermont Economic Progress Council, which oversees the TIF program.

The memos also outline the project’s phasing and amenities. New schematics for the hotel’s southern tower show seven retail spaces on the ground level, topped off with a rooftop restaurant, community space and observation deck.

The residential tower on the north side of the site will feature 121 studios, 142 one-bedrooms and 55 two-bedroom units. The designs don’t specify the rental rates, but Brookfield has committed to making 20 percent of them “affordable” as required by Burlington's inclusionary zoning ordinance.

Brookfield also anticipates having to undergo state permitting under Act 250 because of the hotel concept. The developers say a hotel “is responsive to market demand and can contribute to the continued dynamism of downtown Burlington.”

After many delays, Glassberg said the recent updates from Brookfield show significant progress.

“The stuff they delivered to us ... is the kind of stuff we've been looking for forever,” he said. “I thought it was great news.”

Correction, November 25, 2019: A previous version of this story misstated the number of parking spaces in the project proposal.

The developers behind the long-stalled CityPlace project unveiled on Monday a redesigned concept intended to fill the empty downtown pit that was once home to the Burlington Town Center mall.

Presenting at a Burlington City Council meeting, executives from Brookfield Asset Management pledged to start construction next year.

Gone are the soaring 14-story structures originally proposed. In their place are two towers. One, on the Cherry Street side of the property, would rise 10 stories and hold 280 to 300 apartments — the same as the original proposal. Twenty percent would be "affordable," as required by Burlington's inclusionary zoning ordinance.

A 175-room hotel of similar height would occupy the Bank Street side of the downtown parcel. Retail space would fill the first floor of each building, and levels of parking would fit between — and below — the structures.

The City of Winooski has received four proposals to develop one of the last open downtown parcels and will consider a range of projects including a hotel, offices and housing, city manager Jessie Baker said.

She plans to recommend one plan to the city council for consideration at its November 4 meeting. “We're weighing those options now," Baker said. Until then, the plans are not public, she said.

The city issued a request for proposals for the parcel, known as Lot 7D, on July 22, after negotiations with developer Adam Dubroff to build a hotel or multi-family housing unit on the property fell apart. He is instead refocusing his efforts to build a 90-room Tru by Hilton hotel about a block away, near the Champlain Mill.       

Winooski has been working to bring a hotel to the downtown for at least five years. 

CityPlace Burlington developers have met the city’s first set of demands to get the long-delayed project back on track.

Brookfield Properties wired the city $192,000 on October 7, the first of three deadlines set by Mayor Miro Weinberger in a September 27 letter that demanded the company make good on its promises.

“They have fully and timely complied,” Weinberger said. “It’s a step in the right direction, and it’s a step toward restoring some confidence in them and in the project.”

Opponents of a proposal to demolish one of the oldest houses in Winooski to make way for a 75-unit apartment building at Main and Mansion Streets are appealing the project's approval on September 19 before the city Development Review Board.

The hearing is the latest in a string of attempts to stop the tear-down of the early 19th century Mansion House and two adjacent homes. They would be replaced by a four-story apartment building with commercial space on the ground floor.

The Mansion House is listed on the Vermont State Register of Historic Places. The proposal to raze it has sparked intense debate since March about the balance between historic preservation, density of development and need for new housing in Winooski. 

When CityPlace Burlington developers announced last month that the long-stalled project would be redesigned and further delayed, Mayor Miro Weinberger urged the firm to provide a full update on next steps “as soon as possible.”

Weinberger had hoped to soon see project plans and illustrations and hear how Brookfield Asset Management would minimize the impacts on neighbors who are tired of the hole in the middle of downtown. But he didn’t get his wish at Monday night’s city council meeting, which marked the first time since July that representatives from Brookfield have spoken publicly about their plans for Burlington’s infamous pit.
Instead, their comments amounted to what some councilors called a “non-update update.”

Brookfield vice president of development Aanen Olsen told councilors what they’ve heard many times before: The multimillion-dollar Burlington Town Center redevelopment is a large and complex undertaking that is currently in litigation, which limits what developers can say publicly.

Workers finally got busy at the CityPlace Burlington construction site on Wednesday — but only to remove a large crane that has been parked in the downtown crater for nearly a year.

One of the workers, who declined to give his name, said the crane was needed at a different site.

But John Franco, an attorney representing opponents of the redevelopment, called the explanation “bullshit.” In reality, he said, the crews were disassembling a "Potemkin village" — a term for a deceptive façade — meant to convince locals that work was underway on the controversial project.

Burlington officials will update the public on the stalled CityPlace mall redevelopment early next week, a consultant for the project said Friday.

Jeff Glassberg is scheduled to meet with the Burlington City Council in executive session on Monday night. He said he expects the city to release a statement providing an update on the situation sometime after that. He does not expect the project's majority owner, Brookfield Asset Management, to attend the meeting nor to help craft the statement.

Glassberg wouldn't elaborate when asked what the statement would say. But the consultant, who has liaised between the parties for the last year, said locals are owed an explanation for why construction on the $250 million, 14-story project has yet to begin.

“They absolutely need to share with the public what is going on,” Glassberg said. “It’s the second week of July. My phone is not ringing off the hook with people complaining about noise and dust from construction. That’s what I expected.”