CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The owners of the historic May Co. building should explore a comprehensive redevelopment plan for the former department store, a city commission said Friday.

The Cleveland City Planning Commission rejected a proposal to convert half of the eight-story building, just off downtown Cleveland's Public Square, into parking.

The building's owners, an out-of-state investor group, hoped to create 734 parking spaces on four floors and remove the windows for ventilation.

An architect working on the project said that the ground floor would be maintained for retail, and that housing and offices were possible on the upper floors. But plans submitted to the city focused only on parking, on the building's second through fifth floors.

"Given the amount of investment that's planned for Public Square, and literally all the private sector investment around that building, it just seems to me to be an under-performing repurposing of the building," Anthony Coyne, chairman of the planning commission, said in an interview after the meeting.

"They don't have plans for any of the upper floors," he added. "Everything is speculative."

The May Co. building, owned by an affiliate of the Morgan Reed Group of Miami, Fla., stretches from Euclid Avenue to Prospect Avenue, just east of Public Square. The parking plan was a clear bid to capture traffic from a nearby casino, set to open in mid-May in the Higbee Building at Tower City Center.

But a city design review committee expressed trepidation about the project Thursday and tabled the plan for further review. On Friday, the planning commission sent a stronger message, rejecting the parking proposal outright and asking the property owners to come back with a detailed plan that addresses the entire building.

"The planning commission members made it clear that their vote to disapprove was meant to send a message to the owner," said Bob Brown, the city's planning director.

Middleburg Heights architect Robert Zarzycki represented the owners at the design review and planning meetings. He did not respond to a request for comment after the Friday meeting.

Committee and commission members worried that stripping out the windows and replacing Prospect Avenue storefronts with entrance and exit ramps would damage the historic character of the building and hurt its prospects for complete renovation. The May Co. building, on the National Register of Historic Places, likely is eligible for federal and state tax credits meant to cut the cost of restoring historic structures.

In Northeast Ohio, such credits have helped developers turn empty or little-used buildings into apartment complexes, hotels and offices.

Planning commission members also expressed concern about potential traffic problems and the condition of the building, where the only ground-floor tenants face Euclid Avenue. The building's Prospect Avenue side, which faces the site of a welcome center and valet-parking operation for the casino, is vacant and dilapidated.

"We would love to see a more collaborative, comprehensive redevelopment plan - that may very well include parking," Coyne said.

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