Major site plan OK’d for Alliance project in Reynoldsburg
The journey to Reynoldsburg for the Christian and Missionary Alliance has taken more than a century, but it’s ready to begin building a new home in central Ohio.
A unanimous vote Jan. 5 by the city’s planning and zoning board approved a major site plan for the group’s new national headquarters, the 130,000-square-foot One Alliance Place.
The $200 million plan for the former Kmart site at Main Street and Brice Road was announced in February 2021.
“We’ve existed for 135 years,” Alliance President John Stumbo told zoning board members. “We started in New York and spent some time in Colorado Springs, and to our great surprise, found ourselves as your new neighbors.
“I say to our surprise because we looked at 90 different properties in our search for a new location,” Stumbo said. “It was the former economic development director, (Andrew Bowsher) who met us at the front door of Kmart and began to give us an idea that maybe there was a different relationship here with the city than we had experienced in our many other site visits.”
More:Alliance marks start of development work with Kmart demolition and flying tomatoes
Stumbo did not indicate when construction might begin on the project’s first phase, which includes the headquarters with office, event and retail space; a three-level parking garage with more than 600 spaces; and a plaza area.
The plaza area, which will be on the east side of the headquarters, will include space for “outdoor performances and informal meetings,” along with areas for yard games such as cornhole, according to Rick Fay, a professional landscape architect with Columbus-based OHM Advisors, which is designing the project.
One Alliance Place has room for nine retailers, including a coffee shop.
“We have events for people from all over the world, and we want to host them right here,” Stumbo said. “We want to have the biggest coffee shop in the entire region.”
The evangelical Christian denomination, which was headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, purchased four parcels of land totaling about 15 acres at the corner of Brice and Main.
City leaders have envisioned the development as a mix of retail, restaurants, a hotel, an event center, green space and apartments ‒ something similar to the way Bridge Park and Grandview Yard bring people to Dublin and Grandview Heights, respectively.
The buildout could take five to 10 years, officials have said.
The Alliance, a Protestant denomination, has about 24,000 locations and 6.3 million members globally, including 2,000 churches and 440,000 members in the United States.
Ohio has 107 Alliance churches and 40,600 congregants. That total includes eight locations and 1,200 members in the Columbus area.
Reynoldsburg is within a day’s drive of more than 700 different Alliance congregations, Peter Burgo, director of media relations at the Alliance, told The Columbus Dispatch.
“You’ve welcomed us from day one, and we are grateful for that,” Stumbo said.
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This article originally appeared on ThisWeek: Major site plan OK’d for Alliance project in Reynoldsburg
