Warren City Council wants to ‘fast track’ next steps of city’s town center project
Posted By: Detroit News on June 27, 2025. For more information, please click here to read the source article.
The city of Warren is once again looking at creating a town center near City Hall, which would potentially include restaurants, shops, housing and a hotel.
Warren City Council voted this week to create a Town Center Development Action Committee, which aims to “fast track the next steps of this long-discussed project,” Council Secretary Mindy Moore said. The committee will include Moore, Councilman Jonathan Lafferty and Warren Downtown Development Authority Director Tom Bommarito.
Moore told The News that the committee will discuss extending the scope of the city’s contract with accounting firm Plante Moran to include a feasibility study for the town center. Warren plans to build the center on empty parcels next to City Hall, which is located at 1 City Square, near Van Dyke Avenue.
For years, former Mayor Jim Fouts wanted to create a downtown area adjacent to City Hall with retail, dining, apartments and other amenities, but the City Council criticized financing for the deal. The administration of Mayor Lori Stone, who was elected in November 2023, has brought back the proposal.
Stone told The News that she envisions the town center, which previously had a price tag of $170 million and was billed as a public-private development, as a mixed-use development, and she expects it to include residential, retail and commercial space and possibly a hotel with entertainment space. She said the town center is an “economic development piece.”
“It definitely creates a special concentration that you don’t get from even a strip mall or driving down the street,” she said.
She added that the town center is a social and economic center, and it’s “something special.”
A steering committee, comprising various city officials, has been meeting and working on the town center proposal.
But Moore said the work was “going very, very slowly,” and she and Lafferty wanted to “kind of reset this and get it moving.” So they proposed forming a Town Center Development Action Committee on Tuesday evening.
“We’ve only got two and a half more years in this term,” she said, referring to the current council and mayoral term, “and we’d like to at least see the foundation done.”
Plante Moran is part of the steering committee, and Moore wants the firm to do a feasibility study for the project.
When asked about the slow rate of the project, Bommarito said he thinks “everything in this city runs at its slow rate.” He said he and other city officials did public outreach during Fouts’ administration, but it’s now after the COVID-19 pandemic and a new administration is in place. The Stone administration held a few public outreach meetings on the town center, and Bommarito and his colleagues had to make a presentation to the steering committee. He said he thinks the project is “on pace.”
He estimates that the project will cost “somewhere north of $200 million.” Moore said the city is hoping the project will be a public-private partnership, but city officials aren’t sure yet what the terms of the partnership would be. She said the Downtown Development Authority will probably have to build a parking structure, and it may take out some bonds for the town center project.
She said the council rejected the project proposed by the Fouts administration because “they were proposing basically just giving a developer money, and that’s not what we want to do.”
She said the city can “only bond so much.”
“We’re not going to foot the whole bill. … We’re just going to spur development,” she said.
Bommarito said the city will ultimately issue a Request for Qualifications to help it find a developer to undertake the project.
Stone said that at the outreach meetings, residents have expressed a desire for the town center to include smaller businesses.
“They want things that are like mom-and-pop shops ― like something unique and … tailored to our community,” she said.
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