Boutique hotel, fine-dining restaurant pitched for downtown Lee’s Summit. See plan
As the city of Lee’s Summit continues to build out a downtown entertainment district around the Green Street public market space, a luxury hotel could be in the works — with help from a city loan.
A pair of developers will present plans for a $27.3 million boutique hotel, with an on-site fine dining restaurant, to the Lee’s Summit City Council on Tuesday Night.
The proposed hotel is a collaboration between the Thrash Group, a commercial development firm based in Mississippi, and Lane4, the Kansas City commercial real estate firm acting as the “master developer” steering projects for the whole Green Street area.
The five-story hotel would be called The Novelist and would contain 84 rooms along with Per Se, a ground-floor restaurant spanning about 2,700 square feet.
The initial pitch for the Green Street redevelopment included a boutique hotel, as proposed in 2023, according to city documents. The proposed hotel is intended to compete with similar properties in the Crossroads neighborhood of downtown Kansas City, along with other luxury properties in the KC metro, according to a presentation prepared by city staff.
City staff initially proposed bringing a Marriott franchise to the Green Street corridor but decided to shift away from attracting weekday business travelers, according to the presentation. Instead, the Novelist is projected to bring about 100,000 new visitors to the city over three years.
The city has proposed about $6 million in public incentives for the Novelist project, which would include loaning developers $4 million up front, along with freezing the property taxes on the hotel for its first 10 years. The project would also use a plot of city-owned land currently valued at around $576,000.
The hotel is expected to create 121 construction jobs followed by 106 permanent jobs, according to the presentation. It would sit within the Downtown Lee’s Summit Commercial Improvement District and would be subject to the 0.5% sales tax in effect districtwide.
Also on the table: an EATS-only TIF, which is a tax funding mechanism that would redirect city and county sales taxes paid on food and drinks at the hotel to repay some project costs over time.
The city is not expected to offer the developers breaks on sales tax for hotel room rentals. It stands to collect about $5.5 million in total tax revenue over 30 years, plus another $7.2 million in Business and Industry tax revenue in the same timeframe.
Tuesday will be the council’s first look at plans for The Novelist, with discussion and a final vote taking place in the coming months.
