Bannister Mall/Cerner

[flyingember]

How would you like to see 16,000 parking spaces downtown? That's a 20 story garage spanning 5-6 blocks.

Cerner is parking-centric. The American Royal plan wanted yet more parking for one week a year. Sporting downtown has one of the worst parking lots in the crossroads. All three are connected to the same owners.

I like the idea of new towers but they would have come with a massive parking demand

It wouldn't be worth the 5 towers to end up with blocks of parking garages and the associated teardowns.

Cerner can have it's Chiefs game level of traffic every weekday of the year and downtown can get projects that don't demand a 10% increase in parking capacity downtown.

[mister816]

honest question that i can't seem to find the answer for on google. How many parking spaces are in the power and light district parking garage? i'd be willing to bet that it's somewhere in the ballpark of what cerner would need even if they had to build 2 garages.

I''m not even saying that the complex would have to be in the loop. There is plenty of surface parking around the crown center area that is screaming to be developed. There are swaths of land in the riverfront area and the northern part of the downtown loop is wiiide open and has no foot traffic at all. just imagine taking these areas and adding in dining, hotels and other kinds of retail. it would be a domino effect.

all i'm saying is that if pretty much every other city in america can figure these parking dilemmas out, so can kansas city

[flyingember]

https://www.visitkc.com/visitors/gettin ... ansas-city

1000 spots underneath KC Live, 2000 spots in the garage to the north, 1000 under H&R Block
Cerner would need 4-5x as much parking as that

If we use the garage as a baseline it fills 2/3 of a city block at 8 floors.
So that's 380 people per block per floor extrapolated outwards. So they would need 42 floors worth of parking at that size to have no extra spaces for visitors.

We're talking about 2-3 parking structures the size of One Light and spanning entire blocks to not need 5-6 blocks worth of just parking. Can you imagine that seriously happening? So we're talking about 5-6 blocks worth of 10-12 story structures.

On top of 5-6 towers that all redo the list of tallest building in the state. Realistically you're talking 8-10 buildings downtown.

There is no part of downtown with that many parcels available to build on in one place. The East Village is closest but would mean tearing out everything there today to end up with office only towers that are dead zones after hours.

We solved the problem. we gave them money for a suburban site because that doesn't work for downtown. 16,000 jobs would be great, but not at the expense of downtown itself.

[aknowledgeableperson]

God, every time i think about this project I get more and more upset. I can just imagine having 2 or 3 new 30+ story towers downtown with 1,500 more people in our city's core on a daily basis. It just kills me that the city just let this happen. I HATE this project.

The whole project is way more than 1,500 people.
Anyway, Kansas City is made up of many different parts with many different needs. Would it be nice if it were downtown? For downtown supporters yes but for those around the old Bannister Mall area this may be one thing, with a few other projects, that brings the area back into a middle class neighborhood again. And I am not talking about just the immediate area around the project.

[pash]

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[earthling]

Yeah, the reality is that it's about parking and it's about parking because we don't yet have decent metro wide transit. And while there are some cities drawing in large companies from the burbs, it's the exception not the norm (and they tend to have excellent metro transit to offset parking needs). Doesn't help that Cerner CEO is suburban minded.

Cerner could have easily expanded in another market. At least they are in KCMO.

[pash]

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[aknowledgeableperson]

A better place to live, only if it is downtown? Kansas City is a very big city landwise and having a facility like this in that part of the city will likely make the city a better place to live. Increased property values generating more taxes, more funds for a local school district and library district, more commercial activity generating more taxes, etc has an overall positive effect on the city as a whole.

[shinatoo]

You act like we have 1.75 billion setting in a bank that we could spend on public transportation or on Cerners campus. We don't. Cerner has to generate that money and then gets to write it off. And it's not just city tax write offs, it's state and county also.

It's tax subsidies. Not public funded like the stadium renewal. If Cerner folds up today the tax payers are out nothing. No bonds to pay off. Unlike the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis or Kemper arena.

Inversely, the faster Cerner generates that 1.75 billion in tax revenue the sooner they start paying taxes, or start building their next tax dodge.

We aren't "spending" anything.

[pash]

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[pash]

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[aknowledgeableperson]

By the time all is said and done this project has a chance to impact a very large portion of South and Southeast Kansas City. Put this project together with the development along 87th St between 71 and 435 and the CID or TIF area south of Bannister between Hickman Mills RD and 71 these will affect those areas mentioned above in the City. Should provide a boost to retail along Blue Ridge, redevelop apartment complexes, fix up housing stock, improve local infrastructure, and so much more.
You can't just neglect this part of the City.

[GRID]

While Cerner is doing this crap in KC:



They are leasing some pretty high profile and urban buildings in other countries like:

Spain


France


Netherlands

[shinatoo]

You act like we have 1.75 billion setting in a bank that we could spend on public transportation or on Cerners campus.

No, that's not what I was implying. Cerner's contingent future tax liability, which the city and state agreed to use to fund a bond issue to build parking lots, widen streets, and install new highway ramps for a Cerner headquarters in suburban south Kansas City, could just as well have been used to fund a bond issue to build new streetcar lines and parking garages to serve a Cerner headquarters downtown.

We can bicker about the cost of one approach versus the other. But if you're going to argue that it would have been much more expensive to build the public infrastructure to accommodate Cerner downtown than it's going to cost to build the public infrastructure to accommodate them in south Kansas City, then I'm going to argue that a big part of that cost differential is attributable to the poor state of public infrastructure downtown, which comes as a consequence of directing public money to support projects like this one, to the sole benefit the corporation collecting the subsidy, rather than putting it toward infrastructure that benefits that corporation together with a wide swath of the city's residents and other companies.

In other words, think about the next time we're going to be having this conversation. If this city's public and corporate bigwigs had the understanding, foresight, and leadership to put together a plan to make the improvements in transit and other infrastructure that would have made it it possible for Cerner to build downtown, then the next big employer looking to expand ten years from now could have piggybacked on those investments, too. Or, looking backwards instead of forwards, if anybody in this town over the past several decades had had the brains, the pluck, and the patience to explain that it makes sense to put a few cents of every TIF dollar spent downtown into transit rather than plowing it all into parking garages, then there would have been no question about the possibility or expense of headquartering Cerner downtown. We might still be paying $1.75 billion to make it happen, but it would be $1.75 billion going towards another streetcar line, which many people without Cerner badges would use, or towards garages that would be open to the public in the evenings or weekends, rather than towards parking lots in Cernerville.

You start somewhere, or you start nowhere. And a project as big as this one was a huge missed opportunity finally to get started.

I don't disagree with you.

But you are making an assumption that the choice was Cerner build at Banister or Cerner build downtown. More likely the choice was Cerner build at Banister or Cerner build in Kansas with Star bonds or some other Brownback give away. The brass at Cerner have no interest in a major investment downtown, I think they will come to regret that sooner or later. I would rather see this campus somewhere in KCMO (even at 150 and Raytown Road or up by the Airport) than not in the city at all.

According to the studies done the net loss in tax revenue over 30 years, once you consider the secondary income from increased property values, property tax on FFE for the campus and sales tax from 16,000 new jobs paying on average 75 grand a year and hotel taxes from the new hotel being built; you are looking at net loss in tax revenue of $140 million over 30 years for the city and a gain of about 4 million for the state. Probably a rosy estimate but nothing like giving away 1.75 billion. When the other option is nothing, or build in Kansas.

The biggest risk is Cerner takes a dump and goes out of business in 5 years. At least you have a modern office complex to try and market instead of an abandoned mall in a depressed neighborhood.

[im2kull]

I would just like to re-emphasize the fact that the Tax subsidiary alone to support this suburban office park of Cerner's is MORE than it cost to build the worlds tallest building. JUST the tax subsidiary. Think about that for a second.

[aknowledgeableperson]

So. This project is quite larger than building that tallest structure.

[pash]

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[AlbertHammond]

I always felt the right place for the Cerner campus was between east crossroads and 18th & Vine. It would be the reason for an extension of the streetcar to 18th & Vine and might start to give that area a reason to be. Plus...most of the good old buildings are long gone in that area. I would hope a campus could retain the street grid and be able to re-use the few interesting old buildings that remain. Sure, there will be parking garages, but perhaps they are underground or behind a liner building to make the streetscape more interesting.

Maybe it is on one side of Hwy 71 or both sides. They say they want to attract "millennial" employees. Well...millennials supposedly want to live an urban lifestyle, so watch the east downtown, hospital hill and beacon hill neighborhoods explode with development. They walk/bike/transit to work which lowers the requirement for parking spaces.

Instead.....we get the Bannister Mall site. ...with lots and lots of parking because walking/biking/transit is a poor option at that location.

[GRID]

I wouldn't be as against this project if it was a mixed use, transit oriented (or at least walkable) project. For the amount of incentives Cerner is getting, they should have been required to mix all the office space with retail and and residential and structure some of the parking. A walled off single use office park will do nothing for south KC other than bringing commuting traffic back to the 435 exits out there. Might get a quiktrip out of the deal some day.

[pash]

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