Bids sought a second time for Port Huron business incubator

$5.3 million,” he said.

Dan Casey, the CEO of the Economic Development Alliance of St. Clair County, hopes the second time is the charm for getting bids in on a new business development center and incubator in downtown Port Huron.

Bids went out on Feb. 1 with a deadline of the end of March for submitting bids to construct the 13,000-squarefoot, two-story building on the St. Clair River, just south of the Black River.

e building will include an 8,000-square-foot incubator for young and startup companies called the Buoy, which will replace the cramped, 2,000-square-foot incubator that is now two doors down from the Sperry’s movie theaters downtown.

e building will also be home to the EDA and serve as a meeting and event space. e incubator is a liated with the state-designated Port Huron SmartZone.

Fitzgerald co-owns a gym in Troy called Performance Recovery Wellness and is an expert on nutrition and fitness, a self-styled life coach. He says his gym works with up to 200 clients a month, including those who come in to visit the two massage therapists.

One of his clients, who knew about his background and Weide -

According to a study published in 2021 by the White Oak Initiative, a coalition dedicated to the preservation of American white oak forests, it was projected that in 10-15 years, there would not be enough American white oaks left standing to meet demand.

Oaks trees are generally at least 80 years old when cut down to make oak barrels. Only about one and a half barrels are made from each tree, with whiskey makers in Kentucky alone needing about three

For now, they will buy the white whiskey, the low quality and inexpensive precursor of their nished product, from a distillery in Illinois. e plan is to bring that part of the process in house in a year or so.

They plan to have their first batch of 1,000 bottles distilled there ready for sale in May. The company will also distribute its whiskey to local retail outlets and hopes to have the list of outlets posted on its website, renmandistilling.com, sometime in May.

Also in May is another competition Weideman and Fitzgerald hope will help their marketing — the huge International Whisky Competition in Louisville, Ky., which annually draws thousands of entries from around the world, this time including RenMan.

Contact: thenderson@crain.com (231) 499-2817; @TomHenderson2 e Economic Development Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce is funding $3,380,401; the Michigan Economic Development Corp., $250,000; the Port Huron-based James C. Acheson Trust, $225,000; and Casey’s Economic Development Alliance, $518,529, for a total of $4.37 million.

It has been designed by Vince Cataldo and his Detroit- and St. Clair-based architectural rm of Infuz Ltd.

Because the federal government is a major funder of the project, federal rules mandate a minimum of three bids. Casey hopes to select a bidder in April, break ground about June 1 and be open for business in July 2024.

“But we have more funding available than that,” said Casey. e budget when the project rst started two years ago was $4.25 million, but bids will certainly come in higher than that and higher than current funding commitments.

“Realistically, it will be $5 million to

Casey hoped to have the project well underway by now. e project went out for bids last July, and he hoped to break ground by the end of last year, but he didn’t get a single bid. “It was a very bad time to do that,” said Casey. Prices had gone through the roof, particularly for wood, and this is a woodframe structure. General contractors in turn were worried about being able to get carpenters to bid on their part of the project.

With supply-chain issues easing, as well as the cost of building materials having subsided a bit, Casey said it was time to rebid the project. He said 17 contractors attended a pre-bid meeting with him in early February.

Some features in the design were eliminated or scaled back to lower costs: an external stairway was removed and a second- oor deck is now 750 square feet from from 1,000.

Contact: thenderson@crain.com

(231) 499-2817; @TomHenderson2