OFFICIAL - Corrigan Building

[DaveKCMO]

http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/n ... tives.html

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.

[smh]

Don't forget about the PIAC money for utility relocation!

[pash]

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[Eon Blue]

I could be misremembering, but I thought there was another AEC firm lined up for the Corrigan. Was it Hollis+Miller?

[Eon Blue]

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?

I am also wondering how this will play out.

[DaveKCMO]

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

[loftguy]

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]

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[flyingember]

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

...or Richards-Gebauer.

I would accept anything along a railroad line too. So much of the CID should be legitimate for their projects.

[pash]

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[DaveKCMO]

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

it will remain a parking lot until they find a tenant.

[pash]

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[DaveKCMO]

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. ...

it's not BNIM, i can tell you that for sure (at least as of last week).

at the DTC luncheon on friday he said they were about to announce 150 jobs coming to "19th and main". presumably that is filling out the old building. previous statements indicate it could accommodate 600-700 workers. holland+miller will only occupy 25,000 of 142,000sf.

yes, it's frustrating that new office construction hasn't yet happened. kick a CEO.

[FangKC]

Kansas City is slow to catch up to the trend for companies to come back downtown.

[mgh7676]

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

[TheBigChuckbowski]

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.

Isn't the Corrigan Building spec and the new building on Main dependent on a tenant?

[pash]

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[mgh7676]

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

Good timing by the KC Star. Posted just an hour after my first post, the Star has an update on H+M status with the Corrigan building. It appears they are moving into the top 3 floors.
http://www.kansascity.com/news/business ... 67895.html

[pash]

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[taxi]

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". ...

Speculative posts are much easier to create than speculative buildings.