The dilapidated motel-turned apartments on Veterans Memorial Parkway at Stracks Church Road, and the auto garage next door, could be restored and put to new use thanks to new ownership.

John Holst, representing the property’s new owners, said they plan to get the garage operating as an auto repair business and turn the residences at 16200 Veterans Memorial East into homes dedicated to seniors.

Holst made the comments to the Warren County planning and zoning board Oct. 15 while asking for the property to be rezoned from agriculture to commercial use. The rezoning is necessary to carry out the plans for the property.

“We’ve already started to put things in motion in terms of cleaning up the property. The auto garage was essentially a junk yard ... for the better part of a decade,” Holst commented.

Holst said the apartments in the old motel have been vacant for one to two years, and had been collecting trash. He said the plan is to turn them into affordable homes for independent seniors.

“We want to ... use it as an age-restricted senior housing community. Not assisted living or any other highly regulated senior facility, but just age-restricted,” Holst said. “Given the background of that apartment complex, it doesn’t have the most stellar reputation. We’d like to change that.”

Holst said his business plans to keep the shell of the motel building, which was constructed in the 1950s, while gutting the interior and rehabilitating it. The work would include landscaping and renewing the exterior of the building as well.

Holst said an additional 4 acres of land on the property could possibly be used for RV storage, but no set plans had been decided for it.

Warren County Zoning Administrator Vickie Vohsen gave a positive review to the rezoning proposal, saying it would be good to give new purpose to the abandoned properties. She said the motel building predates the county’s zoning codes, and that the current agricultural zoning puts severe limits on what the owners can do with a building that “is in very rough shape.”

Members of the zoning board voted 5-0 to recommend the change to commercial zoning. That recommendation will go to the Warren County Commission for a final vote in November.

Before the vote, zoning board Vice Chair David Heinlein cautioned that changing to commercial zoning could allow other, unforeseen uses of the property beyond what had been stated.

“Not that that’s a bad thing. We just need to keep that in mind,” Heinlein commented, adding that the property probably should have been rezoned before now.