CLEARWATER — When the city put a request out for an entrepreneur to develop the property at 115 S Martin Luther King Jr. Ave., it got one response. The company Hop Daddy, LLC proposed building a brewery, to be called Salty Bull Brewing, on the dormant site.
On Monday, the city's community redevelopment agency took a major step toward approving their plans.
The city plans to sell the one-acre property to Hop Daddy for $600,000, and give the business a $500,000 grant to get started, CRA director Amanda Thompson said at a meeting of the City Council, which acts as Clearwater's CRA board.
Salty Bull co-founders Bryan Boroksy, Teri Moran and Jeff Moran hope to combine a green space with an industrial area to create a unique brewery experience, Borosky said Monday.
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Thompson acknowledged that the project comes with some risk for the city. As a result, Clearwater plans to put some backstop measures into the agreement with its new partners. The $600,000 in payments to the city will come over 10 years, allowing Clearwater to still have a stake in the property over that time.
The council unanimously voted to allow the CRA to draft an agreement with Hop Daddy for the development and sale of the site.
![Kirby Wilson - General assignment reporter](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 50 50"/%3E "Kirby Wilson - General assignment reporter")
![This rendering shows Scientology's proposed L. Ron Hubbard Hall, a 3,600-seat auditorium with an all-glass facade at the corner of Garden Avenue and Court Street in downtown Clearwater. [Courtesy City of Clearwater]](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 16 9"/%3E "This rendering shows Scientology's proposed L. Ron Hubbard Hall, a 3,600-seat auditorium with an all-glass facade at the corner of Garden Avenue and Court Street in downtown Clearwater. [Courtesy City of Clearwater]")