Plan for luxury apartments, shops and entertainment in Overland Park delayed again
Plans for a retail and entertainment hub at 115th Street and Nall Avenue in Overland Park — a project plagued with challenges from the beginning — have been pushed back a couple of years.
Owners of the high-end Galleria 115 have missed two recent deadlines for building the project. At the city’s finance committee meeting Wednesday night, developers cited several difficulties, including site problems and the struggling retail market.
“You say the economy is great, but Park Place retail (on the other side of Nall) is for sale at a discount,” said attorney John Petersen, representing the developer, Block Real Estate Services. “It’s a very challenging retail, entertainment market.”
The finance committee agreed to extend construction deadlines by two years.
The Overland Park City Council first approved a development agreement in 2017 for the project, which includes a 548-unit luxury apartment complex, retail, restaurants, a grocery store and some sort of entertainment business, which has not been named.
Council members anticipated the development, close to the Overland Park Convention Center, would help transform the College Boulevard corridor and draw more high-end customers from Leawood. The City Council agreed to create a community improvement district at the site, with a special sales tax to be used for development costs.
“(On College Boulevard), we don’t have the live, work, play combination that you need,” Councilman Dave White told the developer on Wednesday. “We’ve got work, but that’s all we’ve got. My hope was you would provide us with those other two elements.”
Block has dealt with several problems since taking over the site. At one point, the team lost one of its development partners. Then the developer had to negotiate purchasing land from Sprint Corp. And Petersen said that though the site may be a good location, it has been difficult to build on, due to the rocky topography and needed utility and infrastructure work.
Last year, the City Council agreed to increase the special sales tax rate from 1% to 1.5% to help pay for added costs, bringing the incentive cap to more than $35 million.
Petersen said another challenge has been attracting a grocery store and shops, especially with retail struggling nationwide. Councilman John Thompson said that if retail is hard to build today, he is worried about the project being viable in a couple of years.
“I’m hearing a lot of concern about the tenuousness of a lot of things that made this project unique, like the grocery store, which is a difficult element to attract, but has a lot of appeal,” Thompson said. “Are we going to be revisiting this in two years?”
Aaron Mesmer, another developer of the project, said he is committed to the original plan for the project.
“I can tell you we are working very hard to attract the right quality of users and uses throughout this deal,” he said. “If you think about the investment in the first phase of the multi-family (apartment building), in this case that’s going to be an $80 million investment. There’s no desire on our part to put something next to it that will drag down the quality of that itself.”
Finance committee members pointed to Block’s other projects across Overland Park, including CityPlace off College and Switzer Road, and said they were assured he would eventually build a high-end development.
The committee agreed to extend construction deadlines. It will likely be at least five years before anything opens.
In other business, the finance committee discussed allowing a public comment period at City Council meetings. Overland Park is one of the few Kansas City-area cities that does not allow the public to speak about topics that aren’t on the agenda. Council members talked about possibly limiting the period to 30 minutes. The committee directed staff to craft the rules, which will likely be presented to the City Council late this winter.
