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The mayor of Barre has temporarily withdrawn a proposal for a multimillion-dollar downtown redevelopment project that would include housing, retail space and a hotel, partly on land he owns.

Mayor Thomas Lauzon said he was disappointed when information and documents he shared about the project in a recent private meeting were leaked to the press. The mayor is spearheading the development.

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He told city councilors at their meeting Tuesday evening that they can “release whatever documents” they want, but the information will change, he said, “because I’m always coming up with new ideas.”

“I’ve never experienced an environment in 12 years quite as political as this one,” he said, adding that he has had to watch his back.

In an interview after the meeting, he said he plans to bring the project back to the City Council “with a vengeance.”

The agenda for Tuesday’s meeting included an action item for councilors to consider accepting real estate purchase options connected with the project. But when that item came up, Councilor Lucas Herring said they wouldn’t be acting on it because the offer of purchase options had been withdrawn.

It appears Lauzon took that step Friday. An email VTDigger obtained that Lauzon sent to City Manager Steve Mackenzie on Friday said: “(P)lease consider the offer to assign said property withdrawn.”

Asked Tuesday night why he had withdrawn the project, Lauzon replied: “I felt that the interest of the project — and therefore our citizens — were best served by not having the city be the custodian of the options. I don’t think it was a good idea for the city to be in that chain of title.”

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According to other documents VTDigger recently obtained, the project could cost between $25 million and $30 million and would be financed with tax credits, federal grants and possibly funding from immigrant investors through the federal EB-5 visa program.

From the beginning, it has been controversial.

Details have been shielded from the public, prompting questions about whether the city and mayor had broken the state open meeting law.

But at Tuesday night’s meeting, the City Council voted to release some of the documents Lauzon presented privately. Councilor Brandon Batham made the motion to do so. Mackenzie said he expected to release them Wednesday.

Some councilors also say the mayor has a conflict of interest and should recuse himself from discussion of the project.

Batham said in an interview that Lauzon has been cycling freely between his roles as mayor, developer and property owner. It’s a textbook case of conflict of interest, he said.

“I don’t know how anybody could objectively look at that and not see a conflict of interest,” Batham said.

Councilor Sue Higby has also said she is concerned about overlapping interests that are obscured by the various companies Lauzon and others may be using to pursue the project.

Lauzon said after Tuesday’s meeting that he has no conflict of interest.

“My property may or may not be involved,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be.”

What he’s trying to do, he said, is put together a group of stakeholders who can work objectively on a project to improve Barre.

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