City of Kent issues warning to The Tulips over unfinished downtown building

With little to no progress evident on a partially built six-story structure in downtown Kent, the city has issued an official warning to the owner, The Tulips LLC.

If The Tulips ignores the warning, which details six separate infractions of city and state codes, the company could be in for monetary fines and legal action. 

The city issued its first building permit to The Tulips on Oct. 2, 2020, paving the way forward for the company to construct a six-story building at 211 Franklin Ave., at the corner of Franklin and Erie Street. Since then, work has proceeded in fits and starts, with long months where no progress seemed evident at all.

The Tulips also owns the partially burned Kent mill on Water Street.

Dated Jan. 24, 2023, the city’s letter to The Tulips outlines six areas of concern:

• Several window openings on the structure are not sealed. Windows are not installed, and plastic sheeting is missing or torn.

• Construction and other debris is visible on site.

• A silt fence on 211 and 227 Franklin Ave. is not installed or positioned to control erosion from the site(s), so sediment runoff is migrating off site and into the public street and stormwater management system.

• Construction fencing is blocking a public sidewalk with no construction activity occurring and no approved maintenance of pedestrian plan authorized by the city.

• The owner has not supplied a city-approved construction work schedule for the entire project — meaning all activities — despite numerous requests for a project construction calendar. Also, the project has not had a project supervisor designated and present on site at all times to manage the project.

• The project has had ongoing, extended periods of time of no construction activity that are not reasonable or customary for a commercial project. Despite the owner having verbally or via emails set deadlines for various activities, those deadlines expired with work not complete. The structure cannot be inhabited, and no certificate of occupancy can be issued. The city identifies the parcel as blighted and a public nuisance.

Badreeyeh Al Hasawi of Kent owns The Tulips. Her husband is Manouchehr Salehi, an authorized representative of the company, who routinely speaks on behalf of the company. Salehi declined to comment for this article, and his attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

Each of the six points violates some aspect of city and/or state codes, the letter states, adding that if each item is not resolved “on or after” a Feb. 5 re-inspection, The Tulips will be cited. That could result in a $100 to $300 fine per violation, as well as additional consequences, including legal action, the letter states.

Kent’s civil offense ordinance states that each day a property is in violation constitutes a separate offense and may be subject to a separate civil offense code.

At some point last week, a small silt fence made of plastic sheeting was installed around the perimeter of 227 Franklin Ave., a vacant lot next to The Tulips’ incomplete structure.

And The Tulips may have another problem on its hands: The city has not fully approved architectural plans that have been submitted for 211 Franklin Ave.

According to Kent Community Development Director Bridget Susel, the Kent architectural firm Metis Design Services that The Tulips had hired to provide project design services, terminated its agreement for architectural services in July 2022. Metis severed the relationship without addressing plan review concerns the city had posed as early as December 2021.

The city requires that all commercial projects name a design professional of record, such as a licensed architect or professional engineer. Susel said the city sent Salehi verbal and email inquiries from August 2022 to March 2023 asking him to name one.

When the Tulips hired the Cleveland-based Sixmo Architecture in March 2023, the city building department presented its representatives with questions that had gone unanswered for years.

Sixmo presented the city with revised architectural plan on Dec. 13, 2023, and the city responded with what Susel termed “technical plan review comments for unanswered or unresolved Ohio Building Code compliance matters” on Jan. 24, 2024. The city’s review includes unresolved and outstanding state building code issues from Metis’ 2020 and 2021 submissions, Susel said.