LAWTON – Lawton City Council has granted the FISTA Development Trust Authority’s request for an additional $2 million, which will come from the city’s 2019 Industrial Development Capital Improvement Projects fund.
The council voted 7-0 Tuesday to approve the request. Councilman Jay Burk was absent.
Councilman Sean Fortenbaugh thanked the FISTA board for taking the time to discuss the issue with council members.
“Now that we’ve done that, I feel a lot more comfortable with this,” he said.
Councilman Kelly Harris said Tuesday he had made some statements and cited some numbers that were inaccurate at the council’s Jan. 11 meeting – the last time the council discussed FISTA’s request. He apologized to FISTA’s vice chairman, Mark Brace, and to the organization’s chairman, Clarence Fortney.
“For the citizens, I spent the last two weeks virtually in a meeting every day, learning something about this project,” Harris said. “As the mayor likes to say, ‘Good things are getting ready to happen in Lawton, Oklahoma.’
“If you’ll bear with us, as a council we promise to do a better job getting information to you. Because this is really, really exciting – an opportunity to have a generational transformation of downtown Lawton and, actually, all of southwest Oklahoma.”
The extra $2 million, which will be added to FISTA’s budget for the current fiscal year, will help the organization cover the cost of renovating the former Sears store in Central Plaza to accommodate defense contractors. FISTA officials have said that bids for the Sears project came in higher than expected.
FISTA is converting the old Sears and Dillard’s stores into spaces that could accommodate new tenants. To reach that goal, FISTA has already demolished the interiors of the Sears store and the former Dillard’s store in Central Plaza to make way for redevelopment.
The organization has also set up the Business Innovation Center in the old IBC Bank building, and some companies are now working in that space.
The construction management firm Smith and Pickel originally estimated that renovating the Sears store would cost about $7.8 million, FISTA Chairman Fortney told the council on Jan. 11. He said FISTA used value engineering – an approach to cutting construction costs which relies on less expensive materials and methods – to reduce the cost of the project.
Some aspects of the project did not attract bidders, so FISTA is planning to put those parts of the project back out for bidding. The organization will wait to act on three other bid packets – including asphalt parking, signage and movable walls in the conference center – as an additional cost-cutting measure.
Fortney estimated that those steps reduced the overall price tag by about $921,000, lowering it to approximately $6.9 million.