The Center of Contention

Ed Briesemeister often holds meetings in a former storefront in the Wayzata Bay Center, a medium-sized, enclosed mall in downtown Wayzata that is past its prime. Briesemeister represents the third developer in the past five years seeking to redevelop the 14.5-acre Bay Center retail site, which is dominated by a parking lot and a single-story structure that hasn’t changed significantly since it was built in the early 1960s.

Though mostly full and centrally located at Superior Boulevard and East Lake Street, just a few hundred feet from the shore of Lake Minnetonka, the Wayzata Bay Center has lost its consumer cachet to Minnetonka’s Ridgedale Mall, which has undergone a multimillion-dollar renovation, and to the much newer Shoppes at Arbor Lakes in Maple Grove.

The jovial yet driven Briesemeister believes he has a solution. He’s the managing director of the Wayzata Bay Redevelopment Company, a subsidiary of Roseville-based Presbyterian Homes and Services. Briesemeister’s chief task is to convince locals that his redevelopment plan—which calls not only for 247 senior housing units but also a park, retail space, portico-covered sidewalks, conventional condos, office space, and a small hotel—would be a boon to the community.

He’s got some selling to do. Briesemeister wants the Wayzata City Council to grant site-specific zoning to allow for higher buildings than current regulations permit. Wayzata has a height restriction of 35 feet or three stories, whichever is less. Wayzata Bay Redevelopment’s proposal includes a five-story senior housing facility and four mixed-use blocks that vary between three, four, and five levels. The buildings’ heights, Breisemeister says, are essential to the economic viability of the project.

Wayzata Bay Redevelopment's proposal, says one city council member, "is not in concert with anything we have ever approved."

Briesemeister is optimistic that he can get his proposal approved. He has had meetings with citizens, who provided input into the design development process before his company even began drawing up a project master plan. And the demand for senior housing appears to be real: According to Briesemeister, there’s already a waiting list for the project’s senior units, and those on the list include Wayzata residents who want to remain in their hometown. What’s more, many residents see a successful redevelopment of the Wayzata Bay Center site as a way to revitalize the city’s downtown and refresh its retail appeal.

But other residents want the developers to pack up and leave Wayzata’s small-town atmosphere intact—or at least significantly downscale development plans.

“Wayzata is only three square miles,” notes Mary Bader, a member of the five-person Wayzata City Council. “We don’t have a lot of square miles to mess up. We are primarily a residential community.” Like some of her fellow Wayzatans, Bader worries about the project’s density and height. Yet she remains hopeful that a mutually acceptable development for the mall site can be worked out: “I think Ed and his team would like to get it right, and I would think Presbyterian Homes, given its reputation, would like to get it right, and we would like to find a way for this to succeed.”

But will they find it? Asked whether Wayzata Bay Redevelopment would pull out if the city were to require that the development be scaled back, Briesemeister’s reply is frank: “Yes. Feasibility is feasibility. The plan has been created from a community-based planning process. It is a well-crafted, nicely done mixed-use project.” A significantly smaller project, he suggests, would make it impossible for Presbyterian Homes and Services to move forward.

And then development of an underutilized space in central Wayzata would once again be at square one.