Design aesthetics played a big part in the Wilmington City Council's decision favoring a Chapel Hill company's plans to redevelop the Water Street Parking deck site, council members said Wednesday.

In a 5-2 vote Tuesday night, the council directed the city manager and city attorney to begin negotiations on the site, considered a key downtown property by officials and residents and a longtime subject of speculation over its best use, with East West Partners first, rather than starting with Cape Fear Development Partners, a local team.

“This particular lot is in the heart of the old part of downtown. I liked the design that Cape Fear Partners submitted, but when I saw how well East West fit the heart of downtown, that made a big difference,” said councilwoman Laura Padgett on Wednesday.

Mayor Bill Saffo and councilman Neil Anderson voted against the measure, which names Cape Fear Partners, the development arm of local commercial real estate firm Cape Fear Commercial, as the second firm the city should negotiate with if the East West talks don't work out.

Council members said they had a tough decision to make, especially after the city staff had whittled the proposals down to Cape Fear's and East West's as the best two, finding that they both include strong development teams and sound financial backing.

“It’s probably the most difficult decision I’ve had to make on council,” said mayor pro-tem Margaret Haynes. “It was a very difficult decision for me because I know Chris Boney [of LS3P, the architectural firm on the Cape Fear Partners development team for the project]; I know these guys, I know they’re great. It just turned out that I thought their design was too massive looking. It was too heavy and too sort of commercial-looking, whereas I thought the East West design had more of a human feel to it.”

Expressing a similar opinion, councilman Charlie Rivenbark, a broker with Wilmington commercial real estate firm Maus Warwick Matthews & Co., on Wednesday said he knows most of the players involved in Cape Fear Development Partners, has worked with them before and hopes to work with them again, but “it felt like the East West project had some extra pop to it.”

In response to the decision, Cape Fear Commercial co-founder Brian Eckel said, "Obviously, we are disappointed. We worked hard, assembled a development team of experts, and if given the opportunity, we would have worked diligently to exceed the expectations of our community and deliver an exceptional project. We respect the wishes of council and will do whatever we can to support the project and East West partners. We want to see the project move forward and wish all involved the best of success."

The East West revised proposal includes 554 parking spaces and a 172-foot-tall building with more than 31,000 square feet of retail space. The plan's 190 residential units would include 58 condominium homes, the revision says.

East West switched architects before giving the city a revised plan in January. Perkins+Will was the architecture firm listed in East West's original proposal.

In the designs the company first submitted to the city, “we just didn't think there was enough imagination and creativity. It wasn't well-received by us nor was it well-received by the city,” said Roger Perry, president of East West Partners.

Perry said the firm went back to some architects it has used for projects in the past, DMA Architecture and CJMW Architecture.

“The previous scheme was big city architecture,” wrote Perry in the revised submission. “It had no relevance to the Downtown Commercial Historic District. The new design corrects this error. The massing, the architectural style, the material selections, the accent detailing, and the use of signage, awnings, and storefronts are concordant with the district.”

The revised submission goes on to address how the changes might affect downtown pedestrians.

“The new design extends Bijou Park through the project, the extension widens into a retail plaza that faces the river and overlooks Water and Chestnut Streets. It creates people-friendly spaces at street level along Water and Chestnut streets to provide a link between the [RiverWalk] and downtown,” it stated.

The Bijou Park connection, including a water feature, was one of the design elements some council members said they particularly liked about the East West proposal.

“Some day we're going to have a Fourth of July celebration out there and that staircase is going to be the grandstand,” said councilman Kevin O'Grady. “I just think it's a great feature, and they were the only ones that came up with it.”

Between its first presentation to city council and submitting its revised proposal, East West also enlisted some local experience, hiring Susi Hamilton to become part of the team, Perry said. Hamilton, who represents the 18th District (parts of New Hanover and Brunswick counties) in the state House of Representatives, is also the founder and CEO of Hamilton Planning Inc., a consulting firm that offers business development services. Hamilton is also vice president of business development for CastleBranch, a former executive director of Wilmington Downtown Inc. and a former city of Wilmington planner.

“I don't think we would have been successful if we had not had Susi to guide us on the path to what it is Wilmington is looking for. We just couldn't have learned enough that quickly on our own,” Perry said.

He said he thinks the biggest challenge moving forward with the redevelopment of the Water Street Parking deck site could be “balancing the creation of the kind of place that the city wants with a project that's also economically viable.”

Perry added, “We're confident we can do that, but it's not going to be easy. That's going to be a hard and difficult thing to accomplish, but I have a lot of confidence in the staff and I have a lot of confidence in the mayor and the council, and I certainly have confidence in our team to be able to achieve that.”

The city is currently in the appraisal process involving the cost of the air rights for the Water Street site, referring to what would be the empty space above the project, deputy city manager Tony Caudle explained to the council Tuesday night. And the cost of demolishing the parking deck is another unknown factor, but, O'Grady said, it was a cost the city would have had to incur anyway.

“The good news out of all of this is we took the bull by the horns,” O'Grady said. “From the day I got here 10 years ago, people were talking about developing it. Nobody ever did anything. We're doing it.”

Padgett said she still isn't in favor of the size of the proposed building, nor of any of the building sizes included in the submissions the city has considered so far. She said she has also advocated a reduction in the amount of parking involved in the redevelopment to encourage people to walk more downtown.

“I'm still hoping the project can be reduced in both the number of residential units and parking spaces,” Padgett said.

But there are still many more discussions behind the scenes and in front before anyone breaks ground on the site, officials said.

“There will be more public meetings and more public input about what people want to see there,” Haynes said.

Perry said, "What we did last night was the end of the beginning. Now the hard work begins to see if we can hammer out something that works for everybody."