They appreciated meeting directly with officials involved with city projects, they said, but it had not eased - or increased the pace - of the heavily bureaucratic process.
"I met with them and saw all the paperwork and bull- you have to go through, and I said, 'I don't know if I want to do this,' " said John Yingling, a restaurant owner based in Provincetown, Mass., who wants to locate a hip bistro two blocks from the soon-to-open Cooper Medical School of Rowan University.
Many municipalities require multiple board approvals and lots of paperwork of new businesses, Yingling acknowledged. Camden's particular frustration, interested entrepreneurs say, is dealing with the amount of vacant land that cannot be immediately sold to an interested party because of absentee property owners.
Yingling, for example, identified 525 Broadway as the site for his proposed bistro, with outdoor seating and parking that stretches back to Williams Street.
The owner of the vacant lot next to the current structure is listed as BNA Corp. of Collingswood, but neither the city nor Yingling has been able to contact such a corporation or a person responsible for the parcel. That lack of information, coupled with the city's demand that Yingling get an appraisal of the property and a pro-forma budget, has put the project on hold, Yingling said Monday from his winter home in Jamaica.
Had the land had a structure on it - even a decrepit one - the city could have invoked the Abandoned Properties Rehabilitation Act to try to acquire the parcel through eminent domain and turn it over to Yingling.
"It's extremely frustrating," said the city's ombudsman, Vince Basara. "We run into this a lot."
