Historic Green Bay Hotel Renovation Becoming A Public Issue

Green Bay’s historic Hotel Northland is in the midst of a $44 million revamping, but the two developers can’t agree who owns the building.

Recently unsealed court documents show city officials tried to broker a $500,000 deal to settle the dispute between two developers, Mike Frantz and Keith Harenda.

According to reporting from Fox 11 News in Green Bay, Harenda says he is the sole owner of the hotel after buying out Frantz, while Frantz continues to say he owns 50 percent.

The court documents show Green Bay Mayor Jim Schmitt and City Attorney Vanessa Chavez were involved in negotiating a resolution that would have paid Frantz in two phases using the $500,000 city loan, according to the Green Bay Press Gazette.

Green Bay’s redevelopment authority initially approved the request for the loan, but it was withdrawn before the City Council considered it, according to the newspaper.

Mayor Jim Schmitt issued a statement saying he is “very disappointed” in the court files and that they “mischaracterize” the nature of his role in the negotiations.

Schmitt said he tried to broker the loan to iron things out between the developers to ensure major lenders wouldn’t pull out of the project.

Green Bay City Council President Tom De Wane said the loan deal would have been a giveaway to Frantz.

“We thought it was kind of suspicious and so I asked our economic developer to hold off on that until I got more information and to find out that the money was to buy Mr. Frantz out. It had nothing to do with the project itself,” De Wane said.

De Wane said he and others on the council got “suspicious” about the deal. He said the city was a stakeholder in the project even before the financing got complicated.

“We got historical grants and other monies for this project,” De Wane said. “So we were involved in it and it just escalated from there.”

The documents were unsealed at the request of several aldermen and the Press Gazette.

Schmitt said the loan offer was an effort to avoid a long court battle between the two developers and to get the project completed. No city money directly exchanged hands with the developers.