Michael Watts found out about the proposed sixteen-story building outside his back window in late September “when everybody else did: when it was announced on SI.com and then in MLive shortly after that.”

The cofounder of Hook advertising lives on the upper floors of the West Side Book Shop on Liberty with a view of the city parking lot on Ashley. He remembers thinking, “Wasn’t this supposed to be affordable housing or some sort of mixed-use housing?”

An unsolicited offer from Sports Illustrated Resorts could lead to a sixteen-story hotel/condo/conference center on the city-owned parking lot behind S. Main St. | Photo: Mark Bialek

The unsolicited proposal to put a sports-themed “resort” on the city’s largest parking lot seemed “unordinary,” Watts continues. “I hadn’t heard of Sports Illustrated in years, let alone Sports Illustrated Resorts.” He read about former council member Jack Eaton’s Freedom of Information Act request for documents on the proposal. “I got a copy of the thing, and it turned out to be 981 pages!”

Up for the challenge, Watts worked it over, eliminated repetitions, arranged a chronology, and created a website, LineItUpA2.com. “Effectively it’s all excerpts from the FOIA,” he says, though to keep it amusing, “I slipped [in] some puns [and] emojis.”

The website went live at the end of November, and Watts says it’s gotten a “mixed” response from 8,900 views and 6,200 unique visitors. “Some folks are like ‘What is this thing?’ People are throwing around the word NIMBY.”

Watts says he set it up “for people to have access to that information.” He hasn’t heard anything from local politicians, council members or anyone from city hall. “Not that many people have emailed,” he says. “But when I see folks around town, they do mention it.”

City administrator Milton Dohoney says he’s seen the website. “I suppose it’s an attempt to try to infer that something shady may be going on,” he says. But he insists there was nothing nefarious about the approach from the company’s agents last summer.

“From the very beginning of this, I have been completely appropriate,” Dohoney says. “When SI brought their team to town, not knowing where this may be headed, I invited several people that are not with city government. So I had the county administrator. I had Destination Ann Arbor. I had SPARK. I had a rep from the University of Michigan.

“Before I turned the floor over to them in front of a room of about twenty-plus people, I said, ‘Odis Jones [one of the people presenting the proposal] worked for me ten years ago or so when I worked in Cincinnati.’”

Developers Jones, Mark Korros, and Chris Schroeder looked at several local properties, including next to city hall, but liked the Kline’s lot—named for the department store that once backed up to it—best. In a late September presentation to council, they laid out a plan for 184 hotel rooms, 80 condos, and more than 53,000 square feet of conference space, plus four levels of parking with 313 spaces with a cost of more than $200 million.

“I haven’t read it all,” says Fourth Ward council member Jen Eyer of the website. “I’m not really interested in commenting on that. To me, what’s important is, what’s the right process for the future of this site?

“The last public conversation we had about this site was to build a mix of housing—housing at market rate and housing at definitively affordable rate,” Eyer continues. “If we are going to change course, I think that we need to make a case to the public. And then we should go about a public process for whether it’s selling it or putting out an RFP [request for proposals] for development.”

“I understand that people can bring unsolicited proposals,” she says. “But for me personally, it’s not a process that I’m comfortable with. That’s why I brought forth the resolution that I did.”

That resolution, which Eyer proposed in an October council meeting along with cosponsors Travis Radina (Ward Three) and Erica Briggs (Ward Four), asked Dohoney to outline his recommendations on the site—ranging from an immediate sale to the SI group to inviting proposals from all other interested parties.

Theirs were the only votes for the resolution. “I thought that that was premature in light of the fact that there was an earnest unsolicited offer in hand,” explains mayor Christopher Taylor. “We should see what that process would result in.”

The mayor and his allies won back control of city council in the 2020 Democratic party primaries and dislodged their last opponents two years later. Until now, they’ve voted unanimously on major development issues. But Taylor rejects the notion that Eyer, Radina, and Briggs’s resolution is a sign of disunity. “Disagreement is perfectly natural among a set of reasonable people,” he says. “Everybody’s committed to good working relationships.”

Like Taylor, Dohoney argues that “you need to first resolve the opportunity that’s on deck in front of you … I would expect the next step to be some kind of community meeting that allows for the people associated with the hotel, the people associated with Destination Ann Arbor, to sort of make presentations about what it’s all about and give people the opportunity to give input.”

Dohoney says that he expects the SI Resorts offer “to be completely resolved, one way or the other” early this year. But even “if we decided that we liked the offer,” he points out, “it would simply become the starting point, because they would still have to go through the typical development process.”

The lot has lain dormant since 1991, when newly empowered Democrats reneged on a deal with Republicans to build a parking structure there. Even now, Dohoney admits that he doesn’t know when something might actually happen. “All I know is today in Ann Arbor we are using a previously appraised multimillion dollar lot to park 140 cars. We are grossly underutilizing that property.”

The mayor agrees in almost the same words. “It’s clear that the Kline’s lot is an underutilized resource, and I think this council is eager to help the city move forward and to optimize our resources.”

“I assume it’s continuing to move forward,” says Watts. “They were out here surveying the lot over Thanksgiving.” Watts knows what he’d like to see when he looks out his window. “Affordable housing is probably one of the highest needs that we have,” he says. “I do think that is a more pressing need than a resort.”

Sports Illustrated’s offer started as a suggestion from Odis Jones’s son. “He played football for Coach Harbaugh,” explains Dohoney. “I had never met him before, but in one of the initial conversations they mentioned that he had brought up in their meetings, ‘Well, why aren’t we looking at Ann Arbor?’”