Kansas City 2020: Part II
On March 27, the longtime chief counsel for the Johnson County Board of Commissioners, Don Jarrett, met with county commissioners in the basement of the county administration building in downtown Olathe. Jarrett was bringing them news and no news at the same time.
He filled in commissioners on the status of the Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant: No remediation work was under way to clean up the polluted soil on 9,000 acres of property south of De Soto, along Kansas Highway 10.
The property’s owner, Sunflower Redevelopment LLC, occasionally talks with the U.S. military about what to do with the former government property, but no agreement is forthcoming. Hardly any of the property is usable in any way.
Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant today looks more like it did in 1950 than what it was supposed to become.
Men and women by the thousands used to travel to Sunflower each day to work at the plant, which made rocket propellant for the U.S. military. Jobs were plentiful during the decades that encapsulated World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Like a lot of military property, Sunflower outlived its usefulness. By the 1990s, the federal government wanted to get rid of the land.
Robert Kory, a Los Angeles lawyer who claimed to have a large book of celebrity clients but seems to have had a connection only to Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen, became one of many men who came to Kansas City with a big idea and left with nothing to show for it. Kory wanted to build a futuristic Wizard of Oz–themed amusement park in Wyandotte County. But he stiffed government officials for the cost of a study he was supposed to cover and later set his sights on Sunflower in Johnson County.
He almost pulled it off, despite having little in the way of firm financial data about his plans. But enough officials worried that he was just going to try to flip the land and sent him packing back to California.
Later, county leaders thought that if someone could clean up the environmental contamination endemic to the manufacture of war chemicals, the 9,000-acre Sunflower site would make a fine place for a new progressive community along the K-10 corridor. But the property has languished. To the untrained eye, the factory looks as though it could start making smokeless gunpowder again at the flip of a switch.
Kansas City is full of these unrealized dreams, all attached to long-dormant parcels of land.
Last week in this space, The Pitch discussed and displayed what Kansas City might look like in 2020, a time when new developments coming out of the ground now should all be operational (KC 2020, April 10, 2014). Any vision of the future comes with realities, though, and this city’s real-estate market is pockmarked by projects that never materialized, long-decaying strips subject to missteps and disagreements among bureaucrats and developers.
You know the spots: the faint-pulsed Great Mall of the Great Plains, the cold, dead Indian Springs Mall, the Walking Dead–looking Citadel. Behind each such structure, a broken promise or 10.
Metcalf South Mall is one example of a place where new ownership might result in a relatively swift reincarnation. The Great Mall is another. But you don’t have to be a pessimist to look at the properties listed this week, and see how Kansas City in 2020 could still look a lot like Kansas City in 2014.
Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant
Location: South of De Soto, Kansas
Owner: Sunflower Redevelopment LLC
The Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant greased the U.S. military’s wheels during World War II and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. The plant employed more than 14,000 at one point, making rocket propellant and smokeless gun powder. The federal government decommissioned the site in the early 1990s and made plans to sell it. But the man who wanted to buy it was a Los Angeles lawyer who wore out his welcome in Wyandotte County pitching an idea to erect, in the plant’s place, a Wizard of Oz–themed amusement park. Kansans weary of being associated with the film proved a tough sell, but Robert Kory nearly convinced Johnson County elected officials to approve his idea before he made them angry, too. The Sunflower site was later sold to a joint venture between Kessinger/Hunter and International Risk Group. Today, no environmental remediation work is being done at the site, and county officials say there’s no agreement on the horizon for what to do with what otherwise would be prime real estate along Kansas Highway 10.
[page]
Truman’s Marketplace
Location: Blue Ridge Boulevard and U.S. Highway 71, Grandview
Owner: RED Legacy?
Grandview wants badly to rebuild the north gateway to change the largely industrial city’s image. The sleepy southern Jackson County suburb has been in prolonged discussions with shopping-center developer RED Legacy to reshape the old Truman Corners into Truman’s Marketplace, something resembling the new strip malls in Independence along Interstate 70. The project’s marketing materials say it would stand across Highway 71 from a future sprawling, 125-acre International House of Prayer campus. Questions have arisen about a city with a $12 million general fund at one point considering a guarantee of nearly $40 million worth of bonds, which would leave the city on the hook if the project itself doesn’t generate enough revenue to repay bondholders. Worse, former Grandview Mayor Steve Dennis, who was a cheerleader for the project, is headed to prison for using a bogus nonprofit to solicit IHOP money.
Mission Gateway
Location: Shawnee Mission Parkway and Johnson Drive, Mission
Owner: Cameron Group
It’s difficult to name another development project that has proceeded with as much ineptitude as Mission Gateway. Many retail developments have gone up in Johnson County since New York–based developer Cameron Group bought the old Mission Center Mall and tore it down, in 2005. During that time, CG principal Tom Valenti has followed a pattern: Announce a construction start date, produce glossy images of the latest version of the project, and return a few months later with a new start date and a number of subtractions from the original design. Today, Wal-Mart is supposed to anchor the development. Beyond that, who knows? A site that was once supposed to have a hotel, an aquarium and office space may well lose yet another key attraction: apartments. Mission’s long, odd wait to see this most visible development site reborn may yield an ordinary strip mall. Or maybe nothing at all.
Great Mall of the Great Plains
Location: 20700 West 151st Street, Olathe
Owner: VanTrust Real Estate
The Great Mall opened in 1997, to much Olathe fanfare. City officials then expected that charter buses would roll around the Midwest, corralling eager rural shoppers ready for an exciting day trip to southern, retail-intensive Olathe. But the out-of-towners never arrived in substantial numbers, and the mall was and remains too far south for Kansas Citians who’d just as soon visit the revitalized Oak Park Mall. (Another liability: The Great Mall–feeding I-35 interchange has always been confusing.) Little in the way of investment has been made in the Great Mall over the past 10 years, so the structure still features much of its original signage and what feels like miles of outdated carpet. Olathe has dangled the site as a redevelopment lure, once for a Kansas City Wizards stadium and later for an IKEA, to no effect. VanTrust, a well-heeled developer backed by resources from late auto magnate Cecil Van Tuyl’s estate, bought the mall from a real-estate investment trust and now says it’s working to somehow reuse the site.
Kemper Arena
Location: 1800 Genessee, in the West Bottoms
Owner: Kansas City, Missouri
Not long after voters approved a sales tax to save the supposedly much-needed Kemper Arena in 1997, Kansas City’s leaders insisted that the city needed a new arena downtown. Once the Sprint Center found approval, city leaders reassured Kansas Citians — who were wondering why they’d just passed a tax to save Kemper — that the West Bottoms oddity would retain all kinds of events. You know: rodeos and monster-truck rallies. Kemper Arena once housed the Kansas City Kings and the Kansas City Scouts, but today it opens the doors to little aside from high school graduations and the American Royal. And the city still pays $1 million a year to keep it open. Two competing plans mean to dictate Kemper Arena’s future. One involves developer Steve Foutch, who wants to convert it into an ambitious youth sports complex. The other comes from the Kemper family, which wants the building demolished and turned into a year-round American Royal complex, owing to the West Bottoms’ stockyard heritage. Neither plan seems to have become a major priority at City Hall.
[page]
Missouri Innovation Park
Location: Interstate 70 and Northeast Adams Dairy Parkway, Blue Springs
Owner: Blue Springs, Missouri
Blue Springs leaders got excited in 2008, believing that sleepy eastern Jackson County was about to get in on the Kansas City “innovation” game. The University of Missouri signed an agreement to put an extension of the flagship university’s campus in a new building near the Adams Pointe Golf Course. Blue Springs bought some vacant land to make the project happen. But nothing has been built, and it doesn’t look like anything is going to happen soon. MU announced that it was abandoning its so-called Mizzou Innovation Center, greatly reducing Blue Springs’ prospects here for realizing the dream of acres upon acres of research and manufacturing.
Indian Springs Mall
Location: Interstate 635 and State Avenue, Kansas City, Kansas
Owner: The Unified Government of Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kansas
The metro has its share of dead malls — none deader than Indian Springs, where development dreams come to die. Politicians continually pledge demolition and revitalization, but nothing changes. Indian Springs Mall used to be fairly popular, easily accessible as it was. But crime, a lousy parking lot, and the business misfortunes of prime tenants such as Montgomery Ward eventually rendered the shopping center hospitable only to a police substation. Today, like most enclosed malls, this 750,000-square-foot behemoth is all but unusable. And it has become a festering bureaucratic sore for the Unified Government, which has concentrated much of its development effort in western Wyandotte County. UG Mayor Mark Holland said recently on KCPT Channel 19 that an announcement for Indian Springs Mall may be coming this summer.
Downtown convention hotel
Location: Somewhere in downtown Kansas City, Missouri
Owner: ?
A 1,000-room hotel is one of those expensive projects that City Hall wants but residents haven’t really requested. That lack of public will is partly why no big hotel proposal has come forth in Kansas City. Taxpayers would likely be on the hook for $100 million or more, an enormous commitment to the idea of reeling in out-of-town conventioneers. Convention business has been in steady decline, even as the city has had a shiny new downtown to show off. Four years ago, former Mayor Mark Funkhouser threw cold water on efforts to pursue a hotel operator, saying it was a bad financial gamble. Now Kansas City is pushing hard to land the 2016 Republican National Convention. If that doesn’t materialize, look for city leaders to say the RNC’s booking elsewhere is evidence that the city needs a massive new hotel.
Metcalf South Mall
Location: 95th Street and Metcalf, Overland Park
Owner: The Kroenke Group and Lane4 Property Group
Enclosed malls have become a highly visible casualty of shoppers’ shifting habits. In the 1970s and ’80s, nobody seemed to mind parking a quarter mile from a door to spend hours inside dark, ominous retail arcades. Today, open-air centers mimic small-town strips such as Massachusetts Street in Lawrence. Metcalf South has lingered in a coma for years, fed by a handful of tenants. This year, Macy’s closed shop at Metcalf, pulling the plug on, and creating a potential headache for, one of Overland Park’s busiest intersections. Stan Kroenke, billionaire real-estate magnate from Columbia, Missouri, recently bought the mall but hasn’t announced what he will do with the property.
[page]
King Louie
Location: 88th Street and Metcalf, Overland Park
Owner: Johnson County
The ski-lodge-style King Louie West building exuded suburban appeal when it housed bowling lanes and an indoor ice rink. But the building eventually got worn down, and its operator moved out. Its size, condition and now-tired kitsch became liabilities that held private developers at bay along this heavy-traffic corridor. Somehow, though, it looked good to JoCo’s Board of County Commissioners; in 2011, six of its seven members decided to buy the old King Louie building for $1.9 million, then toss another $1.6 million at sealing it off from the elements. County officials justified the purchase at the time because they wanted to move the Johnson County Museum there and even add a larger National Museum of Suburbia. Then some elections happened; new commissioners joined the board, and they didn’t like the deal. A national museum sounded fishy to some of them, and the need to get the county museum out of Shawnee wasn’t persuasive enough to convince a majority of commissioners to spend more millions on making King Louie useful again. It sits empty today, dethroned and bereft of money or solid ideas. Some commissioners say the county should sell it.
The Citadel
Location: 63rd Street and Prospect
Owner: Tax Increment Financing Commission of Kansas City
Kansas City taxpayers have invested millions in the Citadel and have gotten only a trashed field in return. The Community Development Corporation–Kansas City was supposed to build a grocery store-anchored strip mall in a part of town that doesn’t see much commercial development. But the men running the CDC-KC were in over their heads, didn’t honor contracts, buried asbestos at the development site, and kept asking the city for more money to start their project. The whole thing exploded when federal authorities indicted the CDC-KC’s principals right after City Hall nearly rejiggered the municipal budget to hand them a $20 million advance. Since then, the Citadel has somehow gotten even worse. The gas station there closed, and the city is still trying to finish decontamination of the site. Still, City Hall paid $15 million to settle a lawsuit brought by CDC-KC. The TIF Commission now owns the site, and the city has hired real-estate firm Kessinger/Hunter to market the property to some future developer.
Richard L. Berkley Riverfront Park
Location: South bank of the Missouri River, between the Heart of America Bridge and the Christopher “Kit” Bond Bridge
Owner: Kansas City, Missouri
The riverfront north of downtown Kansas City is a confounding place. A decent park faces the dirty Missouri River, and a fine concrete trail rolls out of the River Market, only to abruptly end once it reaches the Kit Bond Bridge. An occasional jogger or cyclist uses the park, but aside from the rare festival and fireworks show, the whole area seems out of place, like an idea that never came to fruition. The Port Authority controls development just south of the park and is trying to market the property for some type of use; so far, there has been no substantial interest along the Missouri River.
