Columbia Ventures Managing Partner Dillon Baynes said recently he remains optimistic that City Schools Decatur will relocate its Early Childhood Learning in his company’s E.co East project on East College Avenue.
Baynes first proposed the idea to Decatur’s school board in November 2014, nearly a year before current Superintendent David Dude came on board. But so far nothing definitive has been determined.
“We want to have them,” Baynes said. “Purely from a retail perspective it would be good having the school there. But also parents can drop their children off and then hop on MARTA.”
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The holdup is that CSD needs to purchase .95 of an acre — currently a DeKalb County DFCS parking lot — just south of the E.co East site. The school system would combine this lot with an acre already owned by Columbia Ventures to build the school.
According to Dude, the sale’s been delayed because the county is “re-appraising” the property. He said recently he hopes to have an update on the DFCS lot by early April.
E.co East should open by summer, 2018. This includes 370 market-rate apartments, 92 senior apartments and 22,000 square feet of retail/restaurant. Baynes said that one tenant, the Associated Credit Union, has already signed, and he expects to announce more retail partnerships later this summer.
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