If you live in Mosaic, you already know the feeling: you turn off the Tollway, wind past the trails and the lazy river, and a few minutes later you’re parking on brick-lined streets under the shade of century-old storefronts. Downtown Celina has always felt like the town’s living room, and this week, the city made it official that the room is getting a serious upgrade.
On September 8, Celina City Council approved a $7.5 million economic incentive agreement with developer Celina Real Estate to bring new life to two of downtown’s most recognizable properties: the historic Mayer Building and the old corner gas station on Ohio Street.
What’s Actually Changing
The Mayer Building, a longtime former grocery store at 313 W. Pecan St., is being reimagined as a two-story restaurant with at least 5,000 square feet of space. It’s the kind of adaptive reuse that keeps downtown’s character intact while giving one of its most familiar buildings a new purpose. The walls that once held Mayer Foods will soon hold a dinner crowd.
A few blocks away, the vacant gas station at Ohio and Walnut streets is being redeveloped into a two-story building with roughly 7,200 square feet of retail and restaurant space and another 5,200 square feet of offices. The developer plans to echo the old station’s look in a new facade, a nod to what stood there before, even as the building itself gets a full rebuild. Mayor Ryan Tubbs said he wished the original station could have been saved, but he’s looking forward to new memories being made where it once stood.
Between the two projects, Celina Real Estate is expected to invest $6 million in the gas station site and $1.5 million in the Mayer Building, with the city kicking in up to $2.3 million in incentives once construction and spending benchmarks are met. Work on the Mayer Building has to start by January 2028 and wrap by mid-2029. The gas station redevelopment runs on a slightly longer timeline, from late 2028 through early 2030.
As Mayor Tubbs summed it up, downtown is the heart and soul of Celina, and the numbers back that up.
Why It’s Happening Now
The incentives are funded through Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone No. 11, a downtown-specific taxing district the city created back in 2017 to spur exactly this kind of reinvestment. This isn’t the zone’s first project this year, either. In July, council approved a similar TIRZ-backed incentive package for Trackside Junction, a $15 million mixed-use redevelopment at 111 W. Pecan St. that’s eligible for up to $3.05 million in city incentives. Add it up, and downtown Celina is in the middle of more than $22 million in active redevelopment, all within a few blocks of the Square.
It’s a deliberate strategy, not a coincidence. Anthony Satarino, president of the Celina Economic Development Corporation, has called this the kind of strategic reinvestment that keeps downtown economically active and distinctive, with growth that still feels like Celina rather than a rebrand of it.
Why Mosaic Residents Should Care
For those of us who call Mosaic home, downtown Celina isn’t a tourist stop. It’s part of the routine. It’s Friday Night Markets and Movie Nights on the Square. It’s grabbing pie or barbecue after a Saturday morning at the lake. It’s Cajun Fest, Oktoberfest, and Christmas on the Square, when the whole town seems to show up at once. The Square’s mix of locally owned boutiques, coffee shops, and restaurants, many in buildings that have stood since the early 1900s, is exactly what gives Celina a sense of place that a lot of fast-growing North Texas suburbs simply don’t have.
Photos Source: City of Celina
That’s what makes this investment worth paying attention to. Celina is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, and it would have been easy for downtown to get left behind or paved over in the process. Instead, the city and its developers keep choosing to build around the historic core rather than replace it, renovating what can be saved and echoing what can’t.
For Mosaic families, it means the short drive into town keeps getting more worth taking. A new restaurant in a building that’s been part of downtown for generations. New retail and office space where a gas station used to sit. More reasons to park on the Square, walk a block, and run into a neighbor.
That’s hometown pride, multiplied, and it’s happening just down the road.
Sources: Community Impact Newspaper, Celina Economic Development Corporation, City of Celina
