Mission Gateway developer Tom Valenti wants to change his plans again
It was almost a year ago that Tom Valenti traveled to Mission from New York to hold a ceremonial groundbreaking at the old Mission Mall site.
Since then, flipping over a shovel of mud is about as much physical work as the Cameron Group developer has accomplished at the land he bought in 2005.
Valenti was back in Mission this week. He didn’t bring with him a construction team to start work a year after he said he would. Instead, he brought his usual travel companions: excuses, promises and yet a different development plan for the nine-year-old dirt field he has left where Shawnee Mission Parkway passes over Roe Avenue.
The Prairie Village Post reports that Valenti told city officials that he has a new blueprint for Mission Gateway that includes a bigger Walmart (one poached from Roeland Park, no less). For some reason, he’s thinking about building a hotel there again. A hotel already made an appearance in Valenti’s Mission Gateway disappearing act some time ago, when he thought he could goose state taxpayer incentives for a lavish aquarium. That aquarium went away, and so too did the need for a place for guests to stay overnight. The aquarium remains in the Mission Gateway coffin, but the hotel may come back to life.
Such a new deal would mean a renegotiated development plan that would likely involve a new arrangement for taxpayer incentives. Valenti already had $36 million to play with under the current deal that he struck with the city to build a Walmart-anchored development.
Apparently that’s not enough?
But things have changed in Mission. Laura McConwell, the longtime mayor who largely supported Valenti, is out of office and now running for the Johnson County Board of Commissioners. Newly seated mayor Steve Schowengerdt has signaled less of an appetite for incentive-drive projects.
And according to the Prairie Village Post’s account, members of the council are showing less patience with Valenti’s interminable inability to get any meaningful work done at one of Mission’s prime pieces of real estate.
Valenti once joked to a crowd in Mission that he wouldn’t take 16 years to finish Mission Gateway like it did with another project of his.
He’s got seven years before that promise crumbles like so many others.
Previous coverage of Mission Gateway in The Pitch:
We’re still waiting for Mission Gateway. And waiting. And waiting.
Mission Gateway coming in…2016?
