Uptown South plans have been drawn up and are ambitious. The town is developing Uptown South with a potential goal of going all-green. This would mean no natural gas would be installed and Uptown South would be all electric.
Stan Nord, a Normal Town councilman, said that this would make Normal the first municipality to try and pull something like this off. The architect presented the plans to the council last night and Nord is hoping this comes to a vote.
“All those acres should be put up for sale, and say, ‘Let a private company come in , buy it and put in whatever they think they need.’ Why should taxpayers be developers?” said Nord. “The architect said they want to build flex buildings because they don’t know who is coming in. It may be a grocery store…or this, that and the other… you can’t really build a flex space that could be all kind of different things. A grocery store might need loading docks and then an office space might not need loading docks.”
Nord said this is really being selective with who can move into the Uptown South space because the town is trying to “go-green” and that eliminates a lot of businesses, for example, a restaurant that might use gas stoves.
Benefiting from this will be green-energy companies. It is not yet known what companies would directly benefit but one company that might benefit from Normal “going green” with Uptown South is Enel North America.
On their website, “The clean energy leader tackling climate change by creating a world that runs on 100% clean electricity.”
Enel is currently a client of Recall Strategies, a lobbying firm that Jonathan Callaway founded and lists on LinkedIn as a “Chicago/Washington DC” based firm.
Enel is registered as a “foreign” LLC type with the Secretary of State office. Andy Byars, a candidate for Normal Town council, works for Recall Strategies.
“The town hired an architect to put together a plan on how they can use eight acres,” said Nord. “The architect said that Normal is an ‘electric town’…and that he recommends when the town does Uptown South to not install natural gas because that’s going to be the town’s strongest move to show we are for fixing the climate emergency crisis. So we will be the first and only municipality to do a development without natural gas.”
Nord said this is a great story for a lobbyist that wants to push 100% clean electricity.
“You’ve got an entire section of town…no natural gas, and you have to use green electric. This is a feather in Andy’s lobbying cap,” said Nord. “The same architect brought up that there were lots of ‘firsts’ with Uptown 1.0 and he said, ‘Normal had several things with that development that were ahead of the rest of the country.'”
Normal was the first to require all LED-buildings, Normal was the first to reuse rain water. Nord said whenever the Town of Normal is the first in the nation to do something…that doesn’t mean they are doing it because it is the best practice or it’s the most efficient.
“We are doing it because somebody wants the recognition,” said Nord. “This is being on the bleeding edge of technology. It’s expensive and the government has the ability to tax and I think it is abuse to go the most expensive route when it comes to technology.”
Stan Nord said taxpayers are looking at more money. Nord said it isn’t affordable to do this otherwise businesses would be going all green and they aren’t.
“The town shouldn’t be developing this, but they are… Normal is going to have to subsidize this construction…looking at another $100 million in debt to take and get people to build the way the town wants to develop this. If you have retail areas where you are relying solely on green electric…you have limited the customer base and you are going to have vacancies.”
Normal has just under 10 vacancies in the Uptown area…Trail East and West haven’t been built out and there’s an entire first floor above a parking garage has not been built out and that’s suppose to be office or retail space.
“You can’t stay Uptown 1.0 is a success,” said Nord. “It’s not even finished… the town can’t rent anything out for close to market rate.”
