‘Magnitude of code violations’ may close Kansas City’s Barney Allis garage downtown
Kansas City officials knew they must eventually replace the 65-year-old Barney Allis Plaza and garage downtown.
They laid plans to ready a city garage nearby to take in some of the convention industry traffic while a new Barney Allis was underway.
But now a preliminary report, citing “a magnitude of code violations,” recommends closing the Barney Allis garage immediately. And the nearby garage won’t be ready for well over a year.
“This garage is 20 years past what would normally be its end of life,” said city architect James Freed. “It is in decay. It is deteriorating rapidly.”
Quick, temporary fixes would cost at least $2 million, he said. The estimated cost for a new garage and plaza: $61.6 million.
“All of that’s kind of whirling around together, and I don’t think there’s any immediate solution on any of it,” said Councilwoman Katheryn Shields, 4th District at-large, who chairs the council’s finance committee.
For now, Kansas City’s tourism industry is effectively shuttered because of the novel coronavirus. But when the world emerges from the pandemic, the city may be without parking for its convention business, which officials expected to enter a boom period with the addition of a new downtown convention hotel. The Loews Kansas City Convention Center Hotel canceled its April 2 grand opening because of COVID-19.
The Barney Allis garage, named for a Kansas City hotelier, is centered in the middle of the city’s convention district. Across 12th Street to the north and Wyandotte Street to the east lie the Downtown Marriott’s two towers and a Holiday Inn. To its west across Central Street lies the Kansas City Convention Center, or Bartle Hall, and to the south on 13th Street is Municipal Auditorium.
Barney Allis serves not only convention attendees, but also Kansas Citians going to work and attending events at Bartle, Municipal Auditorium and the Music Hall.
To the group Visit KC, which attracts conventions and tourists to town, the 970-space garage is a major asset.
“It is also, at times, a prime selling point to conventions and many times is the perfect space in helping to achieve their meeting goals,” CEO Jason Fulvi said in a statement. “The Kansas City Convention Center hosts hundreds of events each year ranging from small meetings to major consumer shows attracting 50,000-plus+ attendees — all of which require some activation or usage of Barney Allis Plaza or the garage.”
Councilwoman Heather Hall, 1st District, summed up the situation at a finance committee meeting Wednesday.
“We bought that new piece of land … to build … another garage, which would then hopefully help us while we were rebuilding Barney Allis,” she said. “Well now, we’re in this position where it sounds like we’re not going to have either place to park for the foreseeable future.”
What to do with Barney Allis
Already, parts of the Barney Allis garage are closed.
And according to a preliminary report, engineers with TranSystems toured the garage late last month with city staffers and found it has almost no ventilation.
If hundreds of drivers are idling in the garage after leaving an event downtown, carbon monoxide could build up. The report also raised concerns about the sprinkler, lighting and emergency call systems and flooding in parts of the garage. There were, however, no “immediate” concerns with its structural integrity.
Still, TranSystems recommended immediately closing the garage and ending pedestrian traffic on the plaza above because of the “magnitude of code violations.”
Shields said she wasn’t sure the city had an alternative.
Making the garage usable in the short term would take more than $2 million, Freed said. And keeping the garage going on “life support” for a couple years, he said, could take between $5 million and $25 million.
For now, the garage is still open until TranSystems issues a final report, which should come within days.
At the same time, the City Council is weighing whether to move forward on a new garage there. CBC Real Estate Group, which the city hired as its representative, has recommended a smaller, 408-space garage that would cost $61.6 million.
The plaza above has been underused. It’s not noticeable from two sides because it sits lofted above street level. The recommendation for the new garage calls for the plaza to be at street level, not out of sight.
Shields and other council members are leery of moving forward on a costly project when the city’s financial picture is unclear. Budget experts expect earnings and sales tax revenues to take a hit because the coronavirus pandemic has forced so many businesses to close, at least temporarily. The city could need to cut as much as $115 million from its budget over the next five years.
“I’m just concerned as to whether this is the right time to spend this money,” Hall said.
Shields said because of the uncertainty surrounding the city budget, she is “not inclined to move forward on any new, expensive projects,” though she said Barney Allis is among the most important.
Council members are considering a $537,000 contract extension for CBC to oversee the selection of a firm to design and build the new garage. The group has already short-listed four teams. Also included in the $1 million appropriation ordinance is funding for hazardous materials remediation and removal of public art in the garage.
What to do with that art would be determined during the design process of the new garage, said Chris Hernandez, the city’s spokesman.
But the legislation doesn’t include $450,000 to pay the three losing bidders, a provision that has ruffled feathers among some council members. In such an arrangement, the firms that are not selected to build the garage would each receive $150,000 for their design efforts.
“We have bidders submit proposals all the time, and we don’t pay them for it,” Shields said Wednesday.
Officials working on the project said such an arrangement is common in design-build contracts and means that Kansas City will own the preliminary designs submitted by losing bidders as well as the winning team’s. That arrangement is required under Missouri law for projects in other parts of the state. Kansas City is exempt, but is providing the stipend for this project anyway.
Hernandez said that if the city moves forward with the project, that $450,000 would be included in the project budget. If the city lets the decrepit garage remain, the money set aside for hazmat cleanup and art removal would be repurposed to pay those firms.
After Wednesday’s discussion, the committee decided to hold the ordinance for a week.
Shields said the city has not decided how to pay for the project.
No parking for now
The news that Kansas City might not be able to use the Barney Allis garage while it prepares a secondary site was a shock to some council members.
Earlier this year, Kansas City closed a land purchase at 12th Street and Broadway Boulevard, on the other side of Bartle Hall from Barney Allis Plaza. The city is still working out details with Kansas City Southern, which owns the adjacent land, before it can start construction on another garage, which would take up to 15 months.
Shields said she had been told that would cost more than $20 million. But Hernandez said the cost and timeline were hard to pinpoint because the city hadn’t decided when or what type of garage to build.
Shields said she wasn’t expecting Barney Allis would need to be closed so soon.
“The plan switched from the idea of, ‘Buy this extra land and then we can get something built there before we tear down Barney Allis,’ to ‘Full speed ahead; tear down Barney Allis,’” Shields said.
Councilman Lee Barnes, 5th District at-large, argued the city should stabilize Barney Allis until it can build another garage.
“It’s never been contemplated that we would have a dearth of parking places — no parking spots – for two years,” Barnes said. “That doesn’t make much sense to me.”
The Star’s Steve Vockrodt contributed to this report.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported Kansas City Southern’s relationship to the land Kansas City purchased at 1200 Broadway. Kansas City Southern owns adjacent parcels.
This story was originally published April 13, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
