On August 230, 2021 we received an email from Long Road Distillers stating the following:
Mayor, Richard and Lindsey,
We are writing to you today to inform you of our intent to not renew our lease at 109 & 111 Bridge Park Dr upon the completion of the original term ending in February.
Labor Day weekend will be our last days of operation and we will begin removing our contents in the weeks following.
We had really hoped to be able to make a more substantial investment and operation in Charlevoix however the struggles of finding employees was more than we could overcome. Trying for several months in the spring to just find a single employee to operate the tasting room portion of the business could not be done. We ultimately had someone from our Grand Rapids operation commute up to operate the tasting room four days per week. With the lack of available workforce within Charlevoix and the surrounding area, we do not see a sustainable path to continue operations in the existing tasting room or grow into the entire footprint of the leased premises.
Operating cocktail bar/restaurants in three other locations in Michigan, we can say without a doubt that those communities have prioritized the creation of workforce and affordable housing as part of their community development efforts. Knowing that successful and sustainable tourism economies require attainable housing for staff, we hope that Charlevoix continues to consider ways to create new housing for a more stable workforce in the region.
We appreciate the opportunity to have joined the Charlevoix Downtown. We will let you know when we have our space cleared out so that you can begin marketing the property to new potential tenants.
Jon & Kyle
Jon O'Connor
Owner/Co-Founder
Long Road Distillers
537 Leonard St NW
Grand Rapids, MI 49504
616-450-5649
Then, in correspondence related to coordination of tenant move out, an additional email was sent from Long Road Distillers on September 10, 2021 with a request:
Lindsey,
Thank you for the note. We do really wish Charlevoix would have worked out better, we genuinely appreciate all of your help and support along the way.
As we begin to transition out a couple things. We have paid the September rent. We hope you are able to secure a new tenant as soon as possible and want to try and help get the space ready for you to show and have access as soon as we can. However as we currently still have a lease for the space and are paying rent we are not super motivated to get our stuff out to move into another location or storage unit and have to pay rent on two places at once.
Do you think there is any way we could work out something to cut the rent or terminate the lease early and we can prioritize getting our stuff out and it ready for you ASAP? Again our motivation is to just not pay rent on this location and a storage unit, neither of which are revenue producing for Long Road.
Cheers,
Jon
At this time potential next steps would include listing the space as available and requesting proposals for future tenants. With the Board's permission the request for proposals and availability information can be published with a deadline that allows us to review proposals at the October meeting. There have been several ideas discussed with a couple of interested parties so it would be fair to review all of the proposals at one time.