Stalled development in Reading deserves more media [public!] attention

by Steve Reinbrecht

Here are a couple examples of how bad leadership is holding up economic development in Reading.

Alan Shuman still wants to develop the grand buildings the city bought on Penn Square, in the middle of downtown. It’s been 15 months since City Council spurned Shuman and instead approved Albert Boscov's nonprofit organization to develop the five buildings in the 400 block of Penn Street.

Nov. 25, 2015

The buildings don’t look much different than they have for years – once-impressive facades in a city that’s declining because of egos and incompetence.

July 2014

Shuman, who has developed several city locations, told me Wednesday, Nov. 25, that he still has business owners interested in moving in to the dead-in-the-water project.

He said he is moving some of the tenants he had lined up for the 400 block over to 645 Penn St., an office building which Shuman owns, "because if I wait any longer on getting them an acceptable downtown location they may change their mind and expand their suburban locations,” Shuman wrote in an e-mail.

“I still have the plans [for the downtown buildings] and am finishing up the Big Mill [apartments] project at Eighth and Oley streets so could just move all the contractors down to the Callowhill buildings [on Penn Street]."

Boscov has not replied to my e-mail about the project’s progress.

Another example of non-redevelopment is the city redevelopment authority’s 50-acre empty lot on Clinton Street, which it bought for $1.6 million in November 2013.

The industrial site sounds like a plum -- “shovel ready” with tax breaks, water, sewer and electric lines and a concrete pad with a 103,000-square-foot steel frame.

Two years later, the authority is still searching – not for someone to buy it, but for somebody to try to sell it sell it. In July 2014, the authority – whose job is to market properties – hired CBRE, Delaware County, to market the property. But that contract “ended recently,” reported the Reading Eagle, never a newsgatherer in love with precision.

What else does Adam Mukerji, the authority’s director, and his helper do all day if they don’t market plum properties like this industrial site? What abilities DOES Mukerji have? I e-mailed the RRA on Monday to find out Mukerji’s salary but have had no reply.

And if he can’t do it, why not turn it over to the Greater Reading Economic Partnership, which gets $700,000 a year in county funding, has a staff of six, and whose job is to connect developers with properties in Berks County?

I can’t find the Clinton Street site on the Partnership’s website. I e-mailed the Partnership to ask if I had missed it but received no reply.

My red ink

Maybe the project stalled because Mayor Vaughn Spencer was waiting for just the right developer to show up. Spencer made a big announcement in February that a fertilizer plant was going to buy the place. The Reading Eagle splashed the news.

Soon after, though, the Lehigh Valley Business Journal, for which I occasionally write, broke the news that the fertilizer plant project was dead.

Later in February, Mukerji named a second firm interested in the place: RSI Home Products Inc. of Anaheim, Calif., a cabinet manufacturer that would reportedly create 750 to 900 jobs. No one from the company responded to my e-mail asking about their interest.

Also that month, County Commissioner Kevin S. Barnhardt asked the Berks County Industrial Development Authority to informally help find the best occupant for the site.

Selling industrial properties must be more complicated than it appears to me. But everybody agrees Berks needs more economic development.

"We're one of the poorest cities in the country, and we want to change that," redevelopment authority member Daniel F. Luckey said at the latest meeting.

We can connect the dots, but the Reading Eagle should be covering this stuff on its daily business page or in its weekly business section. The Eagle did have a recent story about the Clinton Street site, by a stringer, on Page B7, where we learn two brokers are interested in a contract to market it. But the authority couldn’t take action at the meeting because it didn’t have a quorum.

It would be great if the Reading Eagle would try to write the truth about how that is pursued, rather than burying vague descriptions of the efforts on Page B7.

I can’t find any mention of BioNitrogen in the Eagle since February, but the Lehigh Valley magazine has followed the economic development news in Reading.