A sneak peek at what might replace Szechuan Garden in Park Hills

The old Szechuan Garden Chinese restaurant on Dixie Highway in Park Hills has sat empty and inoperable for a long time, but now Park Hills residents have an idea of what might go onto the land where it sits after developers held an impromptu community meeting Monday night to discuss their plans for the site and solicit feedback from residents.

“We’re at a point right now where this is fairly preliminary,” said Joe Nienaber, proprietor of Granite World, which is found near the Szechuan Garden building on Dixie Highway and one of the interests in the development. Nienaber is also an elected member of the Kenton County Fiscal Court.

Prior to the meeting, Nienaber had distributed about 60 flyers, he said, to neighboring properties to get the word out.

Nienaber had said that he had one point or another tried to buy many of the properties on Dixie Highway. The exchange for the land where Szechuan Garden sits has not yet occurred, but Nienaber and the other developers said they’ve been working to facilitate one.

Two other developers, Greg Berling and Mark Zimmerman, also organized the meeting.

Zimmerman and Berling have developed several complexes throughout the region, both commercial and residential. Berling is currently involved with the redevelopment of the old Drawbridge Inn site in Fort Mitchell. Zimmerman, on the other hand, was involved with the development of Triple Crown Country Club in Union.

The three spent much of the meeting sharing their early plans for the site and fielding questions from the packed showroom of Granite World, where the meeting took place. The plans they presented were not final but represented a general overview of what they hoped to accomplish at the site.

They passed out paper copies of an early development concept. The site’s zoning is unusual, with a commercial zone in the front of the land, where the Szechuan Garden building is located, and a residential zone in the back, which is currently vacant.

Although the developers initially wanted to develop the site commercially, they just couldn’t make the parking work for a business, Berling said. So, they switched gears to a residential development.

The plan they presented on Monday consisted of two different kinds of townhomes.

The first is a stacked townhome – one-bedroom homes on the bottom floor and three-bedroom homes on the second floor – and the rest would be two-story, two-bedroom townhomes.

Berling compared the stacked townhouses to those already existing in the Aspen Pines development in Wilder. Each unit would have two off-street parking spaces. A 25-foot tree buffer would separate the homes from adjacent property lines. Berling estimated rents to be between $1,800 and $2,700 a month.

Additionally, they’re seeking funding to help the city and state rework the roads around the property.

The hope is to widen Arlington Road where it currently takes a steep vertical curve past the city building before terminating onto Dixie Highway.

In addition to the widening, they’d like to create a new intersection that would connect Dixie Highway, Arlington and the road leading into the development, eliminating the vertical curve. A portion of the land where they’re calling for a new intersection is owned by the city.

Conceivably, this would enable the state, which manages Dixie Highway, to reduce the number of stop lights on the highway from two to one.

“There’s a couple different portions of this project that we looked at, but the road was really the most important because really the city and a lot of city residents would like to see something happen along this corridor at some point,” said Berling. “So, the road also provided access into future commercial [development] that could happen here along Dixie Highway.”

The road work is contingent upon securing funding from the state through the Kenton County Site Development Fund. The city would have to apply for the funding to help bankroll the road project, which the developers put at about $1 million in cost. Berling said the developers would not be able to fund the road project on their own.

Overall, constructing the townhomes would take about a year and a half. The city is currently revising its zoning ordinance, and Nienaber said it would be easier to wait until later this year to seek a modification to the residential zoning that would make it easier to develop.

There were questions among meeting attendees about the tree buffer, potential truck traffic on the new intersection, the overall aesthetics of the properties and the surrounding areas and why the developer sought to make rental properties, instead of owned properties.

As to the question of the buffer, Zimmerman said, “We’re taking the trees out just within this area for the construction. Anything we can leave, we will leave. You have a hillside,… if we take trees out, then you have mudslide issues. So, we would save any tree we can possibly save.”

Regarding the question of rental versus bought properties, Berling said that they were unable to attract interest from local home producers, specifically Drees and Fischer Homes.

“The lot price after development of this became too high for them,” Berling said. “The lot price itself became too high for them to then go build a unit on it and sell at their profit margins.”

Berling added that Fischer and Drees did not inform him of the specific profit margins.

If constructed, the townhomes would be managed by Berling’s property management company, CB Management. Berling said they expect to invest between $4.5 million and $5 million into developing the complex.

Berling and Nienaber said they wanted to get the word out about the potential for the development before it had to go through official processes, as public hearing procedures are highly formalized and don’t allow for freer exchange between residents and the developers.

“We try to meet with residents before it goes to the public hearings,” Berling said. “If you come to the public hearings – you’ve been in public hearings before – and we can’t have conversations like this in public hearings.”

Anyone who did not attend the meeting and has questions about the development can contact Greg Berling by sending an email to gberling@cbman.com.