NORFOLK, Virginia — The City Council unanimously approved a plan Tuesday night to spend $18 million in public money to renovate the former J.C. Penney store at The Gallery at Military Circle.
About half of the shuttered department store could become an operations center for a mortgage company that hasn’t been publicly identified.
But a spokeswoman for South Carolina-based Movement Mortgage LLC, Nicole Peternel, said the company is in talks about opening an office in Norfolk. She declined to discuss details.
In a contract with Norfolk, the city’s Economic Development Authority — which owns the former J.C. Penney — says the new tenant would bring “approximately 200 additional permanent full time jobs.”
But Chuck Rigney, the city’s director of development, told the City Council on Tuesday that the company plans to bring 650 employees to Norfolk when it opens within a year and hire another 250 within three years.
Vice Mayor Angelia Williams Graves said the 200 number refers to new jobs for which Norfolk residents can compete. The other jobs would be transferred from elsewhere.
The jobs would pay an average of $50,000, Rigney said. He added that the deal has not been signed.
The company is expected to get free rent up front and discounted rent later, people familiar with negotiations said.
City officials hope the deal will spur development in the Military Circle area, including more tenants to take up the other half of the former J.C. Penney.
The city has agreed to spend $3.5 million on the renovations, with the other $14.5 million coming from a loan taken out by the Economic Development Authority.
The city will cover any part of the payments on that loan that the authority can’t afford.
Movement Mortgage, which was founded in 2008, used to be based in Virginia Beach but moved its headquarters to Indian Land, South Carolina, in exchange for $53 million in tax incentives, the Charlotte Observer reported last year.
Some jobs were slated to move from Charlotte, North Carolina, to South Carolina as part of the same deal.
The company says it has grown from four employees to more than 3,000 in less than a decade and has 350 offices in 40 states.
Its chief executive officer is former NFL player Casey Crawford, who played for the Carolina Panthers.
