Shawnee OKs incentives to spark development in long-stagnant commercial district

The Shawnee City Council opted to use a public financing tool as an attempt to breathe life into a commercial corridor that’s sat stagnant for almost a decade.

The Midland Entertainment District, which sits off Interstate 435 and Midland Drive, was first developed in the mid-1990s. The commercial corridor is made up of 25 parcels, 19 different owners and multiple undeveloped plots of land.

While the city identifies it as a major commercial corridor, the last large-scale development — a series of hotels — came 10 years ago, City Manager Paul Kramer told the City Council on Monday.

“It acts as an economic and functional liability to the city,” Kramer said. “Considering it’s an area that has great access, visibility and traffic flow, there has simply been little to no investment in this large-scale area.”

Other nearby attractions — like the Lenexa City Center, The Legends Outlet Mall in KCK, and Merriam’s work along Shawnee Mission Parkway — is “making Shawnee dollars leave Shawnee,” nor luring visitors in, he said.

“We’re just not taking advantage of those assets,” he said.

In order to spark new development, the City Council unanimously approved creating a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district at the blighted site to make it easier for developers to build or redevelop parcels of land.

TIF districts do not charge visitors an extra tax, nor does the city provide dollars to build the project like other tax incentives, Kramer said. Rather, it takes the new revenue generated by the development to cover construction costs for a certain number of years.

“The value pays for improvements,” Kramer said. “The other tools seemed ill-suited to bring around the type of development that we required.”

What’s wrong with the site?

In a feasibility study, Kramer said that the city found a 4.8% decrease in commercial property values in the district from 2024 to 2025, unsafe pedestrian infrastructure, deteriorating infrastructure, and inconsistent repairs and patchwork conditions on the site.

When the district was built in the 1990s, it was designed for car access — with limited connectivity to neighbors and large unused “parking fields,” he said.

“There’s a lot of pavement in there,” Kramer said, adding that building facades have visible deterioration, and the site has limited pedestrian connectivity between the different buildings.

“This is a unique commercial district in that there are 19 different property owners,” Kramer said. “A lot of times shopping centers are controlled by one entity. When you look at making repairs … It’s done as a master plan. When you have 19 property owners, getting that accomplished is difficult.”

Current building codes would reduce parking maximums and promote “better land use,” he said, with opportunities for mixed development with residential, retail and restaurants in order to create a more “cohesive development rather than a disparate collection of individual parcels.”

Benefiting businesses

While there was some pushback from neighbors about bringing in multifamily units to an area surrounded by single family homes, developers came forward during public comment to share their support for the district.

“We’ve been playing catch up for the last six years,” said Dennis McIntire, the vice president of strategic development for BNB Theaters, a locally owned movie theater chain with a location in the district. “These are not easy concepts to put together, and they’ve (staff) done a great job.”

When BNB came to the Midland Entertainment District, they conducted a $5 million renovation in 2016 and 2017. McIntire said he’d like to see more investments come through something like a TIF district.

Midland business owners have faced challenges in recent years, including just last year with the Kansas Department of Transportation restoring the I-435 bridge decks over Midland Drive for about a year — making it harder for people to visit those businesses.

“That was a difficult summer,” Kramer said about the construction. “There have been a lot that haven’t turned over. We’re thankful for the service they provide in Shawnee and continue to do great business, we just need to help them out.”

While Kramer said the city has been in discussions with developers about potential projects, nothing is set in stone. Any proposal that comes forward would need to go through the Planning Commission and City Council for final approvals before development can begin.