Rio Nuevo buying vacant lot to build new Greyhound station

Rio Nuevo is buying a vacant lot near East Broadway and South Euclid Avenue to build a new bus terminal for Greyhound.

The 1-acre site cost $575,000. It’s located at 801 E. 12th St., behind the OfficeMax complex.

Greyhound wanted to be near Interstate 10, and the site puts them on the alignment for Downtown Links, a project that will allow buses to get to I-10 without going through downtown traffic.

It’s was Greyhound’s top choice of 12 sites Rio Nuevo showed the company’s representatives, said Rio Nuevo chairman Fletcher McCusker. It’s also close to the University of Arizona, and the majority of people who board a Greyhound bus in Tucson are college students, he said.

The property is in escrow. On Tuesday the Rio Nuevo board in a series of votes authorized an appraisal, a survey and an environmental inspection.

Rio Nuevo’s total budget is $1.7 million, including construction of a 1,500-square-foot terminal that would be open later this year. Rio Nuevo will start accepting proposals for the work.

Rio Nuevo will own the site and lease it to Greyhound.

The building will be state of the art, board member Edmund Marquez said. “It’s going to be beautiful — a huge upgrade to the trailer they’re in now.”

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Greyhound has been in a portable building near Broadway and I-10 in downtown Tucson since 2006, when the city relocated the terminal from a site on Congress Street next to the Rialto Theatre to make way for student apartments. It had been at the Congress Street site since 1969.

Greyhound believed the relocation was to be temporary and thought the city was legally obligated to build a new terminal, McCusker said.

Meanwhile, Rio Nuevo was trying to sell its part of the property — known as the arena site — where the temporary building sat for a new hotel and exhibition hall development.

“The risk of that property ending up in litigation was very high and it would have derailed” the hotel project, McCusker said.

Rio Nuevo took over from the city as the landlord for Greyhound at the temporary site last year and negotiated the new location. It also sold the land to Nor-Generations developer Allan Norville, who already owned the adjacent 10 acres, for $5.6 million.

“By stepping into the city’s shoes, we eliminated the threat of litigation. We also now have a very valuable asset owned by the district and we have a Fortune 500 tenant,” McCusker said. “We enable the Greyhound to have a new terminal and we enable the arena lot project to go forward.”

Under the agreement, the city is still obligated to pay relocation costs, estimated at less than $50,000, and the city had set aside Greyhound’s rent payments to pay for the move.