The North Providence Town Council voted unanimously to put the long-vacant former public safety building at 1967 Mineral Spring Ave back on the open market, ending years of on-again, off-again redevelopment talks for the roughly three-acre site. The building has sat empty since the town's police and fire departments relocated in 2019, and the latest attempt to find it a new life as housing has now collapsed over a paperwork problem.
According to The Valley Breeze, developer Nicholas Durgarian, who owns Smithfield-based Douglas Construction, signed an agreement with Mayor Charles Lombardi back in 2020 to buy the property for roughly $2.5 million. His original plan called for two standalone retail buildings at the front of the lot and a self-storage facility at the rear. The police and fire departments had moved into a new, centralized headquarters that year, leaving the old building behind.
That new facility, the 67,000-square-foot North Providence Public Safety Complex at 1835 Mineral Spring Avenue, cost $28 million and was funded primarily through federal forfeiture funds, according to DiPrete Engineering. It consolidated police, fire, municipal court, and emergency dispatch under one roof when it opened in October 2019, which is what freed up the older Mineral Spring Avenue site in the first place.
A Commercial Plan That Never Got Off the Ground
Durgarian's self-storage-anchored proposal cleared an early hurdle when the North Providence Planning Board approved a conceptual master plan for the project in 2021, even as nearby residents raised objections, as Inside Self-Storage reported at the time. The plan as originally pitched to town zoning officials featured a 39,000-square-foot self-storage building, a drive-thru bank, and a 2,250-square-foot fast-food restaurant. But the Town Council never ratified Durgarian's purchase and sales agreement, and it never granted the approvals needed to move the project forward.```}.```
Then-Council President Dino Autiello delayed action on the deal in December 2021, saying council members needed more time to review plans that involved demolishing existing municipal structures, the same trade outlet reported. Ultimately, the council cited ongoing concerns about the self-storage element as a reason it withheld approval, stalling the deal for years.
Durgarian Pivots to Housing Under New State Law
Durgarian Pivots to Housing Under New State Law Everything changed when Rhode Island enacted sweeping land-use legislation, effective January 1, 2024, making commercial adaptive reuse into residential housing a permitted use by right statewide when at least 50 percent of a commercial building’s gross floor area is converted into housing units, subject to specific and objective zoning provisions and an exception for certain previously recorded environmental land-use restrictions, according to Partridge Snow & Hahn. The law gave Durgarian a new path forward, and he told the Valley Breeze in July that he intended to change direction on the property and build 94 housing units at 1967 Mineral Spring Ave instead of the original commercial layout.
A land use company based in Providence submitted an application for the housing project, and it was scheduled for a Planning Board hearing in September. But the hearing never happened as planned. Town Planner Brent Wiegand told the Breeze last month that the proposed adaptive reuse project was removed from the agenda because of a problem with the application — specifically, it lacked an affidavit of ownership for that particular filing. The town of North Providence still holds the deed to the property, since the original sale to Durgarian was never finalized.
Council Says Enough Is Enough
Durgarian did not respond to calls for clarification on the status of his plans. At the council meeting, member Ronald Baccala said it was time to move on from the property, adding that no agreement had been made and nothing had been signed to his knowledge. Autiello said he agreed with Baccala's assessment.
With that, the council voted unanimously to have the town administration put the building back up for sale. The property was assessed at $2,344,200 in 2026, about $155,800 below the roughly $2.5 million figure Durgarian had agreed to pay back in 2020. State lawmakers introduced further legislation in March 2025 aimed at clarifying the adaptive reuse law and reducing administrative delays for commercial-to-residential conversions, according to the State of Rhode Island General Assembly, a sign that the kind of procedural snags that tripped up this project remain a statewide concern.
A Building With a Long and Odd History
The site's seven years of vacancy haven't been entirely uneventful. In May 2023, the town temporarily leased the empty complex to movie producers for two months to serve as a filming location for the movie sequel Good Burger 2, according to Quahog.org. In 2019, the town also put the former Marieville Elementary School at 1135 Mineral Spring Ave on the market, valued at $1.4 million, as part of a broader effort to offload redundant municipal real estate.
Environmental records add another wrinkle for any future buyer. The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management has documented that the site previously housed three underground storage tanks — an 8,000-gallon gasoline tank, a 6,000-gallon diesel tank, and a 5,000-gallon heating oil tank — infrastructure history that could factor into due diligence for whoever takes on the property next. For now, the building sits empty once again, its future back in the hands of whoever the town finds to replace a deal that never quite made it across the finish line.
