KCRag Forum

During a special meeting Tuesday, the Port Authority board voted 5-0 to approve the exemption and the issuance of bonds of up to $50 million for the project, which is being developed by a joint venture formed by Copaken Brooks and and local developer Vince Bryant.

Masters said the Corrigan Station developers did communicate with the school district and other taxing jurisdictions that will forgo revenue as a result of the exemption. But he said negotiations between the parties, if you can call them that, consisted of the jurisdictions asking the developers to make payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs, to them to soften the blow, the developers saying no, and Port KC then approving the deal.

Now that the exemption for Corrigan Station has been approved, Jon Copaken, a principal with Copaken Brooks, said construction will begin soon and should be completed by next December.

pash wrote:So is this what we're doing now?—PortKC is just going to run around town handing out 20-year abatements, side-stepping all accountability to the city's ordinary political process?

DaveKCMO wrote:i heard that corrigan, board of trade, and 20th/main hotel will be the last that aren't near the port.

loftguy wrote:

DaveKCMO wrote:i heard that corrigan, board of trade, and 20th/main hotel will be the last that aren't near the port.

...or Richards-Gebauer.

pash wrote:So the parking lot on Main will remain a parking lot for the foreseeable future. ...

pash wrote:Right, and there isn't one. This was billed as a spec office building, but evidently Jon Copaken doesn't know what "spec" means. Hopefully this doesn't turn into yet another Copaken special, the pie-in-the-sky development plan, complete with architectural renderings, that is still kicking around a decade and a half later.

And is the prospective tenant, mentioned in the previous Star article, in the "engineering/architecture industry" who needed to move in ASAP (cough, cough, BNIM), now out of the picture? I will refrain what speculating about what that forebodes. ...

pash wrote:Right, and there isn't one. This was billed as a spec office building, but evidently Jon Copaken doesn't know what "spec" means. Hopefully this doesn't turn into yet another Copaken special, the pie-in-the-sky development plan, complete with architectural renderings, that is still kicking around a decade and a half later.

mgh7676 wrote:Am I crazy or did I dream that Hollis+Miller had already announced plans to move into Corrigan?

Edited, found the original article:
http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/n ... trict.html

pash wrote:My impression is not dispositive, clearly, but it always seemed to have been billed as a single project. The new building on Main was not going to be a separate building, but an addition to the Corrigan building which enabled the developers to extend the the second and third floors to nearly treble their original size.

That's why the news that Copaken isn't building the new structure right now really jumped out at me; it changes the basic idea of the project pretty significantly, and it seems unlikely that they'll let the second and third floors of the Corrigan building sit unoccupied once they renovate it. So if they lease the space to a tenant who wants that, and not a space three times as big—at a higher price, because it's mostly in a new addition—it seems rather unlikely that they're going to build this new add-on building any time soon.

To me, anyway, it seems far likelier that the new building on Main has turned out to be classic Copaken vaporware. Which might not be a terrible thing in the long term—it's a great site, and maybe somebody will build something bigger and better there some day.

But meanwhile it looks more and more like we're talking about what this parking lot is going to be "some day". ...