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YOUNGSTOWN -- Potential Development, a pre-K through grade 12 school system for students with autism, is offering $350,000 to the city to buy the long-empty former Bottom Dollar grocery store with a planned $1,066,067 investment to make it a K-3 school.
DeMaine Kitchen, the city's community planning and economic development director, said he is pleased with the proposal and wants to move ahead with the sale.
"I feel good about the purpose and the organization," Kitchen said. "They are a long-standing member of the community. I don't have reservations about them in that space. I'm very comfortable with Potential Development."
Kitchen said he plans to discuss the proposal with City Council's community planning and economic development committee at its Sept. 14 meeting and wants council to authorize the sale at its Sept. 16 meeting.
Paul Garchar, Potential Development's CEO, said right after submitting the lone proposal to buy the building by the Aug. 12 deadline that the school system is crowded at its K-6 building and wants to use the former Bottom Dollar location for some of those students.
The former Bottom Dollar building on Glenwood Avenue is within two miles of Potential Development's three other locations.
The school system has 345 students in total with the pre-school located on East Indianola Avenue and its K-6 school and its high school, for students in grades 7-12, both on Market Street. It opened in 1953 in Youngstown as a special needs preschool program on West Woodland Avenue and expanded to become a K-12 charter school in 2001.
The Potential Development proposal states: "Our vision is to transform the former Bottom Dollar building into a dedicated elementary campus serving students with autism in kindergarten through third grade. The facility will provide a comprehensive educational environment where students receive individualized academic instruction alongside integrated therapeutic services, including speech, occupational and physical therapy. The proposed school will include up to 15 classrooms, three therapy suites, a sensory room, an indoor playground area and administrative offices designed to support both student success and operational excellence."
The proposal states the building work would begin in January 2027 and be ready for classes by August 2027.
The project's largest expenses would be demolition and carpentry, and electrical work.
The new campus would result in the hiring of up to 15 certified teachers and about 25 classroom aides with future staffing increasing as the school reaches capacity, the proposal reads.
The proposal states that Potential Development's 160 employees paid $161144.28 in city income taxes last year, up from $68,078.02 five years earlier.
The Bottom Dollar building has been vacant since January 2015 when the grocery store chain was sold to Aldi Inc., which closed it and all Bottom Dollar locations, including two others in the city.
The Mahoning County Board of Elections toured the Bottom Dollar location on April 9 with board Director David Betras declaring it was the ideal location to relocate its office. Elections board officials wanted the city to either give the building away for nothing or sell it for $1 to the Western Reserve Port Authority and then have the WRPA lease the structure to them for 20 years.
But neither officials from the board of elections or the WRPA sat down with the city for formal negotiations.
The elections board voted 4-0 on July 7 to move ahead with relocating its warehouse from Oakhill Renaissance Place, a former hospital on the city's South Side where it has been located for about 20 years, to the former Bottom Dollar location. The plan would have also moved the early-voting center from Oakhill to Bottom Dollar next year.
However, that vote would have had the board of elections move its other staff to a county administration building that will be erected downtown at the former Eastern Gateway Community College building and garage.
Elections officials had dismissed relocating to that proposed downtown facility almost immediately after county commissioners in January signed an agreement with the WRPA for the project.
But that changed as part of a compromise to relocate to the former Bottom Dollar.
The Vindicator reported Aug. 1 that the board of elections had moved on from Bottom Dollar and were considering another building in the city for its offices. The board hasn't disclosed that location.
Betras said at the time that Bottom Dollar was the board's second choice.
Without a firm commitment, the city sought requests for proposals for the building with Potential Development submitting the lone offer by the Aug. 12 deadline.
Before the deadline, Kitchen said a number of times that he was skeptical of the board of elections' talk of moving to Bottom Dollar because it never presented a plan to the city and formal requests would be required before anything could be done.
The city used $1.2 million in American Rescue Plan funds in 2024 to renovate the 18,285-square-foot former Bottom Dollar building with plans for the Village of Healing to operate an infant mortality clinic as the main tenant. That didn't work out.