Road for Woonsocket DMV winds on
New state office for Division of Motor Vehicles now expected to open this summer
WOONSOCKET – The company in charge of leasing for Woonsocket Plaza says it’s expecting the Division of Motor Vehicles to relocate its satellite office from Pond Street to the shopping center by July.
“I would say the first half of 2018,” said Jeff Smith, director of property management for Northeast Property Group. “We’re excited to have them and look forward to partnering with them.”
The DMV had planned on moving into Diamond Hill Road shopping center last April, but the lease was never executed due to a breakdown in communications with the owners of the plaza, Madison Properties of New York, who were in the midst of switching over to a new leasing company when the deal was crafted.
After some head-scratching about the status of the agreement, the DMV announced that the deal was still alive last fall and that the state Properties Committee had approved a lease with the successor agents of Madison Properties.
Paul Grimaldi, a spokesman for the DMV, said the agency still does not have a firm move-in date, but the state has budgeted $59,500 to lease the site in fiscal 2019, which begins on July 1.
Currently located at 217 Pond St., the DMV has maintained a local registry at one location or another in Woonsocket for decades, but it has been in the market for a new site for more than two years. By late 2015, the agency declared the Pond Street location obsolete and issued the first in series of a public requests for proposals for a suitable alternative.
The DMV expressed a preference for staying in the city, but after issuing two RFPs that failed to yield a local offer of rental space – the agency said it would try one more time before inviting offers from outof-town landlords.
The agency is now on track to lease some 5,000 square feet of space on the southwest corner of Woonsocket Plaza that used to be a McDonald’s many years ago. The fast-food restaurant later moved to a freestanding building in the 23-store, 223,000 square-foot
shopping center, anchored by Burlington Coat Factory, Price-Rite and Ocean State Job Lot.
One of the newest tenants to the plaza is Ollie’s Bargain Outlet, a Mechanicsburg, Pa.-based discount chain that opened its first Rhode Island store in the plaza last year. Overall, the plaza is 87 percent occupied, according to Madison’s marketing information.
Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt, who sees the DMV as an important draw for the shopping area, played a key role in calling Madison Properties to the attention of the state agency’s hunt for new office space. The company was unaware of the DMV’s ongoing search for Woonsocket-based office space until the agency issued its last RFP. Madison Properties offered the company several sites in the shopping center – the only local company to answer the RFP.
Reached for comment about the status of the relocation earlier this week, Baldelli-Hunt said she has been in regular contact with DMV Director Walter R. “Bud” Craddock for progress reports.
“We’ve gotten no indication there’s been any holdup,” she said. “Everything appears to be moving right along.”
Baldelli-Hunt says she’s extremely please to have played a role in keeping a registry in the city. She says the facility is not only a convenience to patrons of the registry, many of whom come from other cities and towns, but an economic driver for the city’s principal shopping area on Diamond Hill Road.
Statewide, the mayor said roughly 1.3 million patrons are served by the DMV every year and the Pond Street registry is the second-busiest of its satellites, completing about 10 percent of all motor vehicle transactions. With the shift to Diamond Hill Road, all that traffic will be drawn into the shopping zone, which is good for business, the mayor says.
“That office will drive approximately 130,000 people a year into that area,” Baldelli-Hunt said.