Kansas Airport Land Sale is Expected

City officials today are expected to announce the sale of most of the Richards-Gebaur Airport land to a Chicago area industrial developer, CenterPoint Properties Trust.

The agreement with CenterPoint would be a big step forward for the long- anticipated redevelopment of the former Air Force base as a regional cargo transit hub.

City officials said the details of the sale would be released today.

City Council member Chuck Eddy said Wednesday that the sale would be for market value. ?That?s what?s tied us up for so many years? in moving the project forward, he said. City officials ?wanted to make sure they got the best value for the property.?

Eddy said a package of proposed city ordinances related to the sale and CenterPoint?s development plans would be introduced today. Eddy said there would also be a public financing component to the project, but he would not discuss details Wednesday. ?Long term, the project will more than pay us back,? he said. ?The projects that are possible for that area are just enormous.?

In a presentation to city officials and others set for today, CenterPoint officials are expected to outline their plan for a public-private partnership that would redevelop more than 900 acres of the nearly 1,400-acre airport site, creating an estimated 3,000 jobs when completed.

When the project was announced in late 2003, Mayor Kay Barnes said early planning called for development of 13 million square feet of industrial and commercial buildings for use by a variety of industries. At the time city officials estimated the project could create 4,000 jobs with capital investment totaling $520 million.

The Kansas City Port Authority in 2003 designated CenterPoint and Kansas City-based Hunt Midwest Enterprises as co-master developers of the airport tract, which it manages for the city. Hunt later backed out as a master developer, but Lee Derrough, president and chief executive officer, said Wednesday that the company was actively negotiating with the Port Authority for development rights beneath the airport.

Derrough said he hoped to announce a deal before the end of the year to mine and develop several million underground square feet as warehouse and industrial space.

Hunt Midwest operates SubTropolis, the largest underground business complex in the world. That cave complex near Interstate 435 and Missouri 210 contained an estimated 50 million square feet of usable space. About 10 percent is currently developed and leased.

One issue complicating development at Richards-Gebaur is environmental cleanup. The Army Corps of Engineers, the Air Force and others have conservatively estimated a need for $17.4 million worth of work involving landfills, groundwater monitoring, asbestos and lead-paint removal from buildings, and cleanup of a city-owned skeet-shooting range.

The city is hopeful the federal government will assume much of the cleanup costs associated with the former military installation, and is negotiating those issues. Corps and Air Force negotiators have advised the city that only limited money is available through 2007, however, and that cleanup of the site remained a low federal priority.

The Port Authority, meanwhile, has applied to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources for participation in a state environmental cleanup program that can lower remediation costs by easing some standards based on future land-use plans.

In a briefing paper issued Wednesday on the project, city officials said they hoped within a few months to have a lower-cost, state-approved cleanup plan in place.

CenterPoint, a real estate investment trust, is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol CNT. The company bills itself as the largest industrial developer in the Chicago market with ownership of an estimated 38 million square feet of developed facilities and more than 3,000 acres under its control for potential development of 44 million square feet of industrial space.