Brookridge development hopeful Chris Curtin at least hired the right consultant

Anyone who can read a map understands why Overland Park’s Brookridge Country Club was going to be redeveloped someday.

Golf is a hobby on the decline, and Brookridge’s courses make inefficient use of land for a place like Overland Park — especially here, where Interstate-435 traffic hisses by and Antioch Road is still an artery.

But the plan to refashion the Brookridge land is a questionable one.

For one thing, the $2.4 billion speculation would add more office space than there is on the Country Club Plaza. For another, it wasn’t brought to the public by a well-known local developer — a Ken Block or a VanTrust Real Estate, say — but by the relatively unheard-of Chris Curtin, owner of Curtin Property Co.

Curtin says he wants to build 3.8 million square feet of office space (by comparison, Crown Center and the Crossroads total 4.4 million square feet), about 350,000 square feet of retail space, three hotels, about 2,500 residential units, a 3,000-seat amphitheater and a nine-hole golf course at the Brookridge site.

The big numbers don’t stop there. Curtin says he can get 20,000 jobs at his development — more than Cerner says it will employ at its Bannister Mall redevelopment in Kansas City.

The Overland Park City Council last week approved the creation of TIF (tax-increment financing) and STAR (sales-tax revenue) bond districts (more on that later), which doesn’t commit the city to the project.

Curtin’s primary experience is developing apartment complexes in Manhattan, Kansas, and in Overland Park (the Woods of Cherry Creek, at 123rd Street and Metcalf). But his company’s website doesn’t reference its prior projects, and at press time, Curtin hadn’t responded to an e-mail asking about his portfolio.

Curtin’s attorney, John Petersen, says his client will be “broadening out his team” to bring other elements of his project to bear.

“The smartest developers are the ones that make sure they have a broad and deep enough team,” Petersen says. “And he has the experience to do that.”

For a businessman with an obscure development background, Curtin is asking for a lot of public subsidy. Curtin has requested a taxpayer-infused Crock-Pot stew of community-improvement districts, TIF, STAR bonds and $27 million in direct subsidy from the Overland Park general fund — adding up to more than $600 million from the public dole.

Petersen says the $600 million figure isn’t a firm number but instead a “snapshot.”

“This is a one-time snapshot of what could be available from the public side through the various incentive programs that are on the table,” Petersen tells The Pitch.

Two things stand out here: One is the use of STAR bonds. These bonds, a rich development inducement, were originally meant to back tourism projects that could attract people well outside the area. Kansas City, Kansas, built the Legends Outlets, the Kansas Speedway and Sporting Park with STAR bonds. Curtin’s project wants $130 million worth of them, which would be repaid with sales taxes generated by his project. But, as announced, his development doesn’t have any one component extraordinary enough to entice people from Emporia to load up the kids for a weekend at Brookridge.

The 3,000-seat amphitheater is the most plausible tourism draw. An Overland Park document calls it the “centerpiece” of the project. But the Kansas City metro isn’t hurting for performance venues.

“They’re probably trying to blow smoke up the STAR-bonds people’s asses,” says Uptown Theater owner Larry Sells. He adds that the local performance-venue business is a saturated, cutthroat trade.

Curtin seems to think otherwise, couching his amphitheater as a draw that would fit neatly between smaller places, like the Uptown, and larger outlets, such as Starlight Theatre and Sprint Center. The main competition, Curtin’s documents say, would be the Midland.

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He hired a man named Eric Lander to create a feasibility study of his project. Lander is a consultant for Canyon Research Southwest who, as many local developers and their attorneys can attest, is good at shaping numbers to make a development proposal look like a slam dunk.

Here’s an example: In order to qualify for STAR bonds, a project must attract at least 30 percent of its visitors from outside a 100-mile radius. Lander’s report on Brookridge predicts that Curtin’s project will draw 3,039,000 annual visitors, 34 percent from at least 100 miles away. Bingo.

It’s worth noting that Lander was hired by Mission Gateway developer Tom Valenti when that project tried to get STAR bonds for an aquarium-anchored development at the old Mission Mall site. Lander’s report for that project also managed to cite the magic number, predicting a 30-percent patronage from outside a 100-mile radius. The market obviously disagreed; Valenti eventually abandoned the idea when he couldn’t line up financing. (Lander’s report also predicted that 240,000 visitors a year would come from 100 miles away to visit a Wal-Mart in Mission in a metro with 19 other such stores.)

Lander’s Brookridge report says the amphitheater would gross from $30.7 million to $32.6 million a year during its first six years of operation. That number sounds high to Sells for a 3,000-seat theater. “That’s if they corner the market and nobody wants to go anywhere else,” he says.

But it’s hard to corner the market as an open-air amphitheater that closes during the winter months.

Meanwhile, for Brookridge to meet the STAR-bonds criteria for its 350,000 square feet of retail space (less than half the area of Zona Rosa, in the Northland), Curtin would need to sign rare and fashionable tenants.

Petersen says the Brookridge proposal isn’t meant to be broken down into its various parts. He says it’s a complete package, the kind of place that a family from Oklahoma City might decide to visit for the weekend. He likens Curtin’s Brookridge to the metro’s most famed district.

“Everybody instantly knows what that [the Plaza] means,” Petersen says. “It means ‘cool place to shop, dine.’ It’s centrally located. It doesn’t mean for 48 hours of the weekend you’re going to be at the Plaza. You’re going to go to the Royals game. You’re going to go to Starlight. With Brookridge, it’s the same thing.”

If that Oklahoma City family decides to scout office space while visiting Brookridge, Curtin’s proposal has plenty to offer — almost double the square footage of Corporate Woods.

South Johnson County’s top-tier office space is mostly leased (Colliers International says there’s only a 5.6 percent vacancy rate in that submarket), and much of the existing so-called Class A space is aging and barely considered Class A anymore. But despite that seeming demand for new office space, real-estate experts who spoke with The Pitch are skeptical about whether the south Johnson County market can absorb 3.8 million square feet of new space, particularly without an anchor tenant.

That much new office space could become an expensive pawn in the economic-development border war. Look at what happened when Sprint started downsizing in Overland Park. As the company began subleasing its empty space at deep discounts, lease rates at other office buildings were driven down. Smelling a bargain, major downtown Kansas City companies, such as KeyBank Real Estate Capital and J.P. Morgan, relocated to the Sprint campus.

The Sprint campus, like this Brookridge proposal, was heavily subsidized by taxpayers. That’s how Sprint could afford to lease space to tenants below market value.

“We will be challenged by that all along the way, that we are not putting ourselves in a position through utilization of public money where we can have an unfair competitive advantage,” Petersen says.

Beyond TIF and the STAR bonds, which redirect taxes generated by the project back into itself, Curtin has requested $27 million of direct subsidy out of the Overland Park general fund. That works out to $377 per Overland Park household — a number that the city’s leaders aren’t ignoring so far.

“The $27 million — if I had to quantify, it is five years of our capital-improvement budget or our entire reserve,” says Overland Park councilman Terry Goodman. “I think that the city, frankly, doesn’t have the capacity, short of raising taxes, to spend that kind of money.”