pash wrote:Nowhere else in the country do businesses get billions of dollars in handouts to build suburban office parks. If you think Cerner would have moved its headquarters to another metro, you're kidding yourself.
The reason nobody held Cerner to a higher standard is simply that we don't have a higher standard.
The only way that could have been done is if the KC metro were on the same page. Cerner would have simply jumped the state line and built something halfway to Emporia or Lawrence instead because Kansas is the only state that would give Cerner anything close to what Missouri did. The Cerner incentives and the terribly planned project that KCMO is getting out of this deal is a direct result of the state line economic border war. KCMO and Missouri really didn't have a choice, especially after losing the previous project which was to include the soccer stadium to Kansas.
This is a terrible project for KC. It's actually a net loss for the city, even over 15-20 years. The city is giving back to Cerner every single dime of economic activity the project will generate, including the Etax and Sales taxes. Financially, the city would have been better off had Cerner built in Kansas because many thousands of employees that work there will still live in KCMO and pay the KCMO etax. KCMO will not get that revenue now.
The office park will clean up the area. It will look better from the interstate. That's about it though. It's really sad that Cerner played KC like this and the metro (primarily kansas side) has created such a terrible situation that forces the city to settle for poorly planned and located projects funded by mass corporate welfare.
This project could have re-invented and re-defined South Kansas City by giving it a brand new identity and a clean slate of residential mixed use neighborhoods that would have possibly even started the gentrification of the single family areas around it.
Or it could have instantly put downtown KCMO right up with Denver, Minneapolis, Charlotte, Austin etc as a truly booming downtown by adding millions of sq ft of office space plus all the spin-off hotel and residential development that would have followed, not to mention making improved transit happen faster etc.
Instead, it's basically just a city/state funded office park in an isolated location surrounded by surface parking that will never do anything for SKC and Downtown KC will continue to have one of the lowest percents of regional employment of any major city in the US.
It's not too late. This is why I'm still so vocal about the project. If enough people put enough pressure on Cerner, maybe they will see the light and see just how much they could have really changed KC. They still have time to make that Bannister project better and they still have time to have some sort of presence downtown. Just a single 700,000 sq ft building alone downtown would be like adding another One KC place. Cerner could break off part of this project and invest in downtown and still have a huge project at Bannister. They are already all over the metro. I don't see how they are able to recruit nationally with all these suburban campuses. Young people don't want to live and work in places like Village West or some secure campus in a suburban ghetto, not when they can go to San Fransisco, DC, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Denver etc and live and work in an urban environment. Cerner is stuck in 1980.