Med mart planners envision a facility stocked with multi-ethnic computer people.

  • Med mart planners envision a facility stocked with multi-ethnic computer people.

The identity of some tenants signing up for space in Cleveland’s future medical mart will be revealed within the next few weeks, according to the lawyer handling the project for the county.

Tenants’ letters of intent will start being converted to cast-in-stone contracts around November 18, when the county expects to close on the purchase of land needed for the mart, says lawyer Jeffrey Appelbaum. Those contracts will require tenants to go public.

“In advance of that there will probably be some strategic announcements made,” says Appelbaum.
Any news of binding agreements for medical mart space will be welcomed by Cuyahoga County taxpayers, who have been blindly footing the bill through the quarter-cent sales tax increase since 2007.

Why the secrecy thus far?

This article appears in Oct 20-26, 2010.

Vince Grzegorek has been with Scene since 2007 and editor-in-chief since 2012. He previously worked at Discount Drug Mart and Texas Roadhouse.

One reply on “Med Mart: Total Number of Tenants Rising, Identities to Be Revealed”

  1. What irks me the most about this whole project is the amount of wasted money. For less than 1/3 the money (about $100 million) we could place the medical mart inside the southeast corner of the IX Center then connect the center to a hotel or two east and south of the facility via an elevated monorail that extends to the airport and RTA Rapid Transit.

    You end up with an 850,000 SF convention facility/meeting rooms (2.5 times larger than the downtown proposal and bigger than the Nashville project), a 2 story 126,000 SF medical mart built as an “interiors project”, a few new hotels (private funding), and an elevated monorail for weather protected public transportation that connects all elements to the airport and rapid transit. From the rapid transit you would have access to Tower City (entertainment, restaurants, and shopping), the new casino, and a short bus or cab trip up the Euclid Corridor to access the Playhose District and futher down University Circle.

    Me Architecture, Inc. has worked out concept that would give us all this for under $100 million, plus, be bigger and operating sooner than Nashville. That would allow the County to remove the current 0.25% sales tax imediately, own the buildings outright and only give a “managing” contract to MMPI.

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