Water Worked

Twenty years ago, the Brookfield Building, at 11th Street and Baltimore in the heart of downtown Kansas City, was filled to near capacity. Today it stands empty, a victim of neglect.

Its former tenants endured power outages, boiler trouble and tiring climbs up the stairwells when the elevators were down. “The services were bad,” says lawyer Stanley Wiles, who vacated an office on the building’s 10th floor nearly a year ago.

Only a couple of street-level businesses remained when a cold spell hit this past December and the pipes froze and burst.

“We were all drowned out,” says optometrist Irving Fudemberg, one of the last remaining tenants. Before water damage closed his business, Fudemberg had been an eye doctor downtown for 50 years.

The Brookfield Building opened in the 1930s. But it’s not as if the building had the misfortune of simply being left out of downtown’s revitalization. At the time of the flood, it was owned by the same developer who had received a generous tax break for renovating the View, a high-profile redevelopment a few blocks east of the Brookfield Building.

The developer, Richard Turner, is the managing partner of the group that has transformed the former Vista Del Rio Apartments into a condominium tower. Long nicknamed the “Beirut Building,” the Vista Del Rio was one of the city’s great eyesores. Eager to see it renovated, the Planned Industrial Expansion Authority granted Turner’s group an incentive. For tax purposes, the property was treated as if it were a vacant lot. Last year, the View, where condo prices range from $139,000 to $695,000, paid a mere $22,858 in taxes. (Midtown’s Ambassador Apartments, where the rent is as low as $315 a month and the ambulance calls are frequent, paid $26,949.) The abatement lasts 25 years.

The PIEA was created in 1974 to foster commercial and industrial redevelopment. Operating largely in obscurity, the agency has the power of eminent domain, which allows government agencies to seize land.

The PIEA approved the View’s tax break with the knowledge that one of the partners in the deal was a convicted felon. Turner’s longtime business partner, Wayne Reeder served 28 months in federal custody and was ordered to pay $16.5 million in restitution for his role in the sudden failure of two insurance companies in Rhode Island and Arizona. He was released in 2002.

A Missouri native who spent most of his life in Southern California, where he developed real estate, 73-year-old Reeder claimed innocence at his trial in the insurance case. Yet his name also appears in various accounts of the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s (“He’s No Angel,” September 16, 2004). A 1990 Houston Post story said that he allegedly defaulted on $14 million in loans from Silverado Savings and Loan of Denver.

In granting the tax abatement, PIEA officials chose not to dwell on what they knew about Reeder’s past. “Sometimes unconventional people and unconventional approaches require thinking outside the box,” PIEA Executive Director Al Figuly told the Pitch in 2004.

The public, Figuly said, was exposed to risk only in the sense that the View’s developers might not be able to finish the project. But Figuly might have considered all the possibilities of taking a convicted cheat into the city’s tax-abating arms.

In November 2004, Cates Sheet Metal Industries, a Lenexa company, filed a $9,683 lien against the View, alleging nonpayment. Last April, the state Department of Natural Resources fined the View $20,000 for improper asbestos removal. That same month, a contractor named Timothy Bowman sued Turner and Reeder, claiming that he was promised and then denied a stake in the Brookfield Building. (The suit says the partners had planned to turn the Brookfield Building into condos.) In court papers, the defendants dispute Bowman’s claim on the Brookfield Building and state that his work at the View was “inadequate and faulty.”

Turner bought the Brookfield Building in 2004.

He faced a lawsuit there, too. Among the Brookfield Building’s tenants was a sushi restaurant called Kaya. After a fire at the restaurant, a cleaning company called American Catastrophe sued Turner and Pioneer Village Estates (the building’s corporate identity) last September for $32,387. The defendants deny owing the clean-up company anything.

As litigation mounted, the few businesses that remained in the Brookfield Building suffered. Customers sweated through haircuts at Carl’s Barbershop on summer days when the air conditioning malfunctioned. Fudemberg says his complaints about the building’s deteriorating condition were met with silence. At one point, he says, he stationed himself in the lobby of the View, hoping to speak with Turner — but never saw him.

As summer turned to winter, new misery arrived. “The landlord never heated the building,” Fudemberg says.

The ruptured pipes dispersed the building’s last tenants. Gary Cottle, who cut hair at Carl’s for nearly 20 years, called his clients and told them that he couldn’t accept appointments until he found a new place. Fudemberg says he spent several evenings on the phone with a 30-year employee who worried about her future.

Today, locked doors, smeared glass and a musty smell greet visitors to the Brookfield Building. Turner, a certified public accountant who has known Reeder for 40 years, did not respond to calls for comment.

Figuly, the PIEA director, was unaware of Turner’s interest in the Brookfield Building or its plight. After a Pitch reporter explained the details, Figuly acknowledged the irony of rewarding a developer who rescues one project from blight while appearing to foster it at another location.

“People have to be honorable, and we hope that we deal with honorable people,” he says.

But “hope” seems to be the PIEA’s operative concept. For the most part, the PIEA takes developers at their word. A pair of unusually biting articles in The Kansas City Business Journal recently described how the agency operates mostly out of sight and engages in less rigorous self-analysis than other city development agencies, like the Tax Increment Financing Commission. The Business Journal examined records and determined that the PIEA’s board had rejected only one request for a tax abatement since 2000.

Figuly tells the Pitch that the PIEA tries to act in such a way that “things always end up better off than they were before we got involved.” He notes the View’s progress. “People are moving in. Units are being sold and occupied. I think when you start looking at where we were three years ago and where we are now, I’m real, real pleased with that project. I think the community in general is.”

As for the Brookfield Building, Figuly says, “If what you say is indeed correct, I would hope that somebody would step up to the plate and take some responsibility.”

Washed out, the Brookfield’s last tenants have tried to get back on their feet. Fudemberg looked for a new space for his business outside the freeway loop, where rents are cheaper. He says he’s leased a spot at 15th Street and Walnut and hopes to move in within a month. Cottle, the barber, is seeing customers again at a shop in the Commerce Bank Building.

Turner and Reeder, meantime, revel in the adulation of a thankful city. Last week, the Economic Development Corporation, the umbrella organization for the city’s development agencies, recognized the View at its annual Cornerstone Awards.

The ceremony was held at the Marriott Muehlebach Tower, just a block south of the Brookfield Building. The city certified the Brookfield as a dangerous building last May, after the fire in the sushi place. The notice, which says the building has been found to be a public nuisance, still stands.