Parking flap delays Demonbreun deal

By RICHARD LAWSON
Staff Writer

A legal fight over parking has held up a proposed $100 million development being considered for a prime piece of real estate near the Music Row roundabout.

Music Square Properties, an affiliate of country singer Reba McEntire's Starstruck Entertainment, has a deal to sell the former Barbara Mandrell Theater at the Music Row roundabout and adjoining property along Demonbreun Street.

But the sale, which could lead to construction of a hotel, offices and condominiums where a vacant Shoney's Restaurant is today, has gotten hung up because of a parking easement dispute with the owners of the neighboring Comfort Inn.

The impasse has led to a lawsuit in which Music Square Properties has sued in Davidson County Chancery Court to get the issue resolved so it can sell the land to developer Eakin Properties, the firm building the nine-story Roundabout Plaza office complex about a block away.

Owners of the Comfort Inn, meanwhile, say they're willing to let the sale go forward, but they want a $1 million payment and 60 parking spaces in an underground parking garage that would be attached to a new hotel as compensation.

According to the lawsuit, Music Square and the Comfort Inn have a ''cross-parking easement'' on the land between the hotel, for years known as the Shoney's Inn, and the former Shoney's Restaurant. The easement allows for shared parking.

Music Square says the easement as written doesn't prevent a sale or construction on the site, and there's no legal requirement to pay Comfort Inn's owners for that right.

The suit says the parking dispute has placed a cloud on the Shoney's site and unfairly delayed a sale.

Eakin Properties, which is building the 225,000-square-foot Roundabout Plaza, has an agreement to buy the property. The developer entered into the agreement with Music Square after an earlier one with Brentwood developers Tom Smith and Nelson Crowe ended a few months ago.

''Right now, we are working on various different options on the site,'' said John Eakin, a principal with the firm. Eakin isn't a party to the lawsuit, although his company is an interested bystander. ''I'm very hopeful this whole thing gets resolved,'' Eakin said yesterday.

In a June 2 letter attached to the lawsuit, Comfort Inn's owners and their lawyer, John M. Brittingham, argue that building on the site amounts to an ''unreasonable interference'' with the 146-room Comfort Inn's operations and its easement rights.

In the letter to Music Square's Nashville attorney, Richard Warren, Comfort Inn's owners offer two options.

In one, they asked for the 60 exclusive parking spaces and $1 million in cash to compensate them for harm to the Comfort Inn's business. With the other, they offer to buy the strip of land now used for parking for up to $600,000.

''We tried to work out something, and we weren't successful,'' Music Square's Warren said yesterday.

The lawsuit calls the proposal for a $1 million payment ''a thinly disguised attempt to obtain money from Music Square.'' The suit asks the court to declare that the easement in question doesn't restrict building on the Shoney's site.