The city is taking a harder look at an arrangement to sell the Scott Street parking deck to private developer John Bays who said his “patience is running low” while waiting for the deal to be closed.

An agreement to sell the deck to Bays for $151,000 without seeking other bids or proposals is under review, City Manager James Capparelli said Thursday.

“We’re just making sure that it’s the right way to go forward with it,” Capparelli said. “We are taking a hard look at it.”

The deal was to go to the council for approval on Feb. 16, less than two weeks after it was first made public by being put on the agenda for a council committee that voted to move it on to the full council for a final vote.

But city officials pulled it off the Feb. 16 agenda, saying they had determined they first needed to meet state requirements of public notice for the sale of a city facility. They said then that the parking deck deal with Bays would be brought back to the council for a vote on March 16.

The agenda for that meeting came out Thursday without the parking deck agreement included.

Capparelli said the city has not heard from anyone else interested in buying the deck but “will do some more analysis to decide if we sell it to Bays or put it out for bids.”

The bidding process is not required, city officials say, because Joliet has home rule powers and a specific ordinance allowing the sale of city property without bids. Capparelli said the city also is concerned about slowing down Bays’ development projects downtown.

“You want the projects he has to move forward,” he said. “And if this is going to delay those projects while we cross the t’s and dot the i’s, we don’t want that to happen.”

Bays after hearing that the council will not vote on the parking deck agreement next week said “my patience is running low.”

“When I do something I like to do it fast,” he said. “I don’t like to be jacked around.”

Bays called the Scott Street parking deck “a loser” for the city.

“It’s always going to be a loser no matter what they do with it,” he said. “It’s going to be a loser for me, but I need it to bring tenants downtown.”

A 2015 consultant’s report for the city determined the Scott Street deck needs $915,000 in repairs. Bays said he believes the cost is now up to $2 million.

City Economic Development Director Derek Conley told the council committee that reviewed the Bays deal that the city could not get an appraisal on the deck because appraisers considered it worthless. But one appraiser provided a report concluding that it was not feasible for the city to do the repairs recommended in the 2015 report.