Mission Gateway developer is prepping a new plan (it still involves a Wal-mart)

In the border-warring Kansas City metro, developers enjoy a nearly inexhuastible supply of leverage, patience and goodwill from elected officials eager to someday cut the ribbon in front of a successful project. City councils and state legislatures rarely call a bluff when the latest player asks for taxpayer money or begs for more time when a deadline has been missed. Public leaders instead bend over backward to ensure that developers don’t take their projects elsewhere.

For an object lesson in just how bottomless that leverage, patience and goodwill can be, look at Mission. Leaders of that Kansas suburb have let New York developer Tom Valenti — hapless shepherd of the Mission Gateway project — string them along for nearly a decade.

But Valenti may finally have run out of rope. In January, a fed-up Mission City Council voted to tack a $600,000 special assessment onto Valenti’s property-tax bill, to recover the city’s costs on infrastructure improvements that it had completed to make Valenti’s job easier. That vote came after an attorney representing Valenti, Polsinelli’s Korb Maxwell, intimated that a special assessment would delay the developer’s effort to bring yet another revised Mission Gateway plan before the city. (Valenti had, last November, presented the council with a stripped-down, Wal-Mart-anchored strip mall — an utterly unremarkable proposal that still would have commanded $25 million of public subsidy.)

“We think that is an improper use of the developer’s time at this point,” Maxwell said.

Mission’s City Council disagreed, and it now seems that the body was right to call Maxwell’s bluff. The Pitch has learned, from a Kansas Open Records Act request, that Valenti’s latest plan is all but identical to the November version; it simply reintroduces market-rate apartments to a development scheme that has toyed all along with cohabiting renters and big-box retailers.

This time, Valenti says construction would start in the fall of 2015. But Mission records make it clear that Valenti doesn’t yet have any bank financing lined up. He also has shown zero retail lease agreements other than the Wal-Mart bid. And he still doesn’t have a franchise agreement for the 150-room hotel that he insists belongs side by side with a Wal-Mart.

He still plans to seek an unspecified amount of public subsidy for his project, though he has offered no clear timeline on when he will bring a final version of this plan before the Mission City Council.

If Mission’s most recent move toward a hardball approach with Valenti is any indication, leaders there are less likely to rubber-stamp a Gateway comprising a Wal-Mart and a hotel. No matter what the council does, though, other local municipalities are about to get another teachable moment from their beleaguered neighbor.