Council - Special Meeting

Good evening, everybody.

It's 6 o'clock. We're going to go ahead and call this meeting of the City Council to order.

Roll call, please.

Council Member Safer?

Here.

Council Member Bailey?

Here.

Council Member McGraw? Here. Council Member Cain? Here. Council Member Alvarez? Here. Council Member Wells? Here. Council Member Larson? Here. Council Member Clicklick is absent.

Okay. And it's not on the agenda, but I did speak to Tom ahead of the meeting. Make sure it's okay. We are going to open the forum for public comments. So if you are a member of the public wishing to speak this evening, on the topic at hand, that is a Tom Barzee stipulation, on the topic at hand, please approach the podium, state your name, the record, and please keep commenting for five minutes. Thank you. Good evening.

Good evening.

I saw your email and I responded to it. I've read the document. I don't know a whole lot about it. I don't know where all the money's coming from. I don't know the developer, proposed grocery store manager. I first thought it was the same entity as before, because the name looks very similar, but I know it's not now. But I believe citizens should have a chance to respond once we hear the proposal from the developer and questions come up, rather than limiting only the council members to talk about it. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you. Thank you, sir.

Further public comments?

Seeing none, we'll move to item three.

Presentation by One North Development LLC.

All right. Go ahead and call up PJ Gostello to do a presentation. Good evening. Good evening.

Good evening. Thanks for having me. Just wanted to run through what our plan is here for the Fresh Market of Northtown. We've been working with the city now for almost a year since the previous developer defaulted on this and wanted to show you what we're going to do and I will definitely answer any questions with permission from council.

So this is some of the elevation drawings. This is our planned proposed grocery store.

And this is what conceptually it will look like. We have not made any. We do not have the definitive drawings yet because we're not approved for the funding yet to proceed. So that's what we're working on tonight.

My development partners are Kathy Warman Architecture.

Kathy is here. She works in North Kansas City.

She's been here her entire career.

This project for her has a whole lot of sentimental value just because she has been here and she wants to be a part of this. And I'm super excited to work with Kathy on this project as I've worked with her on several other projects in the past.

Hey, PJ, hold just a second. We're getting a lot of feedback on the live stream. We've got a number of people watching. I'm not sure. Can everybody make sure your mics are off? Is Stephen in the back? I just want to make this one that we've got a lot of people watching. I know. I thought I was just in front of the people here. Yeah, we're getting a lot of feedback on the audio.

All the councils' mics are off.

Is it any better now?

Let's see. Yeah, I'm getting, I got like immediate text messages. There's a bad echo on the broadcast. Everybody enjoy the beautiful picture on the screen. If anyone watching wants to send me a message, let me know if we've got it corrected.

Do you want me to start back up?

Go ahead.

Okay, so Kathy Worman, as I was saying, is the architect for this project. EPC Real Estate Group will be helping with the development. They've done over a billion dollars with the projects in the Kansas City metro area, so I'm excited to work with them. The CEO, Mike McKean, I've worked with him on several other projects, and Joe Morrison, which will be helping us with this project. Fogle Anderson Construction Company will be building The project, they're a trusted partner from Associated Wholesale Grocers. They built several grocery stores that are operating right now in the Kansas City metro area. Stinson LLP, that's the attorney that will be working with your group to make sure that the development goes smooth from a legal perspective. And the Fresh Market Operations, which is Eddie Mousselet, who's an AWG independent retailer, will be the tenant for the building. He owns several stores in the area. I think nine. This will be the 10th store. So the site plan is in the One North District, which was a proposed district. I think 2016 is when this started. It's area three. It'll have 252 parking spaces. It's approximately on 6.84 acres. There's four curb cuts, which you can see. I know it's a little small on that TV. So there's ample room for traffic flow, easy exit, easy entry. There's room for trucks. to have their own entrance so they won't be impeding any of the pedestrians. And it also allows for some future retail expansion on the south side, which is shown there. You can see the grocery store, which is the main building, and then the potential retail is down there on the south.

So it is a full service grocery store.

I know in the past there was some other plans to maybe make a smaller grocery store there, but we wanted to make sure that we had a full service store so that we could not only service this community, but anyone in the surrounding areas that might want to come and patronize the store. When I say full service, we'll have a fresh seafood and meat counter, fresh produce, deli, bakery, a floral department, seasonal items which we can run inside and outside a wine beer and liquor quick serve food and there'll also be a restaurant and cafe concept which has outdoor seating and indoor seating so the exterior elevations you saw you saw on the first page but The architectural finishes, it's not going to look like an institutional big cast concrete building. We plan to use different surfaces and things, glass, to make this kind of pop and something that the community could say, hey, this is our grocery store, something they could be proud of, something that us as developers and owners can be proud of as well. This is a different view from the south side of the parking lot. You can see that it shows some of the potential retail on the other side that we'd like to explore. It has ease of parking. It has an additional patio as well in case a restaurant or something would want to go in there. This is something that we definitely think will add to the retail and the tax dollars that the city will receive from the project. Here's some of the benefits of the project that need to be discussed or need to actually be highlighted, I guess I should say. There's $20 million in annual projected revenue from the grocery store. So those tax dollars will come back to the city. There's 100 new jobs, totaling $4.5 million in compensation. That will be in the fresh market operation. There's things that we've done. We know you guys have worked for something that you're doing with your whole city plan, but making sure that there's walkability for the residents. It'll attract the local residents, as well as hopefully some of the south of the river traffic that's moving onto the riverfront there. So this store, we're hoping will be something that this community supports, but we will also get outside support from the residents in the area. We worked closely with city council and economic development to make sure that the 2016 plan that was put in place, that we were doing everything to that exact spec so that everyone could be happy and could get exactly what they wanted in 2016. We're not asking, because we're the second developer, to come in and change anything or ask for any special uses or anything like that. We just want to have the grocery store that you wanted and the grocery store that we want to build. So the last thing that it does is it does secure the development incentives that were approved in 2016. And those are going to expire if we don't get something in place and inked for the city. And then that would cause a whole new approval process and we might not get those funds. This is the last slide. It's just a little bit more of a bigger interior view of what the store will look like. You could see there it is a full service grocery store. It's not a small market or something where you can't get everything that you would want. You'll be able to go to the store and do all of your shopping. You won't have to leave the city to go anywhere else. I'd open the floor up for questions from city council or anyone else that I can.

All right. Thank you so much for the presentation and for all the work, as you noted. It's been about a year that we've been working on this together with this team. And I want to go back and highlight the team one more time, that you yourself is kind of the lead on this. And then Kathy, local architect, amazing work. Your reputation has certainly preceded you. Mike with EPC, got him sitting out here. And the audience as well. Fogle Anderson, Stinson, and Eddie Muslett. Just a dream team, I'd call it. It's been an absolute pleasure to work with you guys to get to this point. And then I'd be remiss not to also note the work that the city council's put in. This has been a lot of behind-the-scenes kind of stuff. council's before us this has been a goal of the city since long before any of us got into leadership positions and it's it's wild to kind of see it coming to fruition seeing these pictures that we have on the screen with the disclaimer it may not look exactly like it is on the screen Make sure you're writing that down out in the room. But this is just really exciting. Legal review, Steve Sparks has been instrumental in getting us here. Tom has been wonderful. We've had multiple rounds of financial advisors looking into all of this stuff, into all the deals. Previous Mayor DeLong, Councilmember Fitzgerald, been digging deep into the financials. So I feel really good about where we've gotten to with this. I think the asks have been very fair from the development team. The incentives that are on the table were conceived of, again, before any of us took our offices. And then the money that's going in, the big dollars that people see were funds that were escrowed from sales of other lots in the development with the intention of bringing a grocery store. This has been a stated goal of every master plan ever since. It's the number one thing people ask for. So thank you for proposing it. Thank you for bringing this to us. Do we have any questions from the city council at this point? Anything I'm leaving out? Mike or Steve, anything? Do we have a timeline you're willing to share? I know we've talked about this a little bit, but anything that you can say at this point?

So the goal is to be open in 2027. Okay.

All right. Everybody write that down.

And I think we can achieve that.

Awesome. All right. So goal of shopping at this store, cutting the ribbon.

It's a very realistic goal. And we've already started a whole lot of other things in the background in anticipation that this meeting would go well. So we're ready to go as soon as you say yes.

Excellent. All right. Anything else? Council Member Alvarez. Yes.

I just want to say again, appreciate all the work that you've done on this. And we're super excited. So everything looks great. It looks like you've done all the work, you know, behind the scenes, and we're just super excited.

Thank you.

That's awesome.

As the ward for council representative, great location.

I think a lot of my neighbors will be very pleased.

But I had a question. Do you feel like the floor plan is flexible? It's not locked in now, or do you think that that will be the floor plan?

So this will be the floor plan in 10 days, for sure, unless there's something that is just hated. So when I say that, I did not come up with this floor plan. Associated Wholesale Grocers did. So we showed them the size of the building or the footprint of the building, and then we asked them to fit the model that makes sense in a 50,000-square-foot grocery store. So show us... where the bread should be, show us where the milk should be based on their industry knowledge. So I would say that it definitely could be adjusted, but you'd have to talk to them because I don't know where it should be adjusted. I'm using the experts on that.

It looks great to me.

OK.

I see an entire section for smoked meats, so hard to miss with that. All right. Do we want to go ahead and move on to item four?

An ordinance approving a development agreement and purchase agreement with One North Development LLC, bill number 7987, ordinance number 9784. Do we have a motion?

We need a first reading on this one. First reading.

Second.

All in favor? Yes. Any opposed? Motion passes.

An ordinance adopting and approving a development agreement between the City of North Kansas City, Missouri and One North Development LLC for a certain development project in the city and approving a real estate sale and purchase agreement between the City of North Kansas City, Missouri and One North Development LLC.

I move that bill number 7987 be placed under second and final reading and approved as ordinance number 9784. Second. Call the roll.

Council Member Saper? Yes. Council Member Bailey? Yes. Council Member McGrone? Yes. Council Member Kane? Yes. Council Member Alvarez? Yes. Council Member Wells? Yes. Council Member Larson? Yes. Council Member Click? Yes. And ordinance, adopting and approving a development agreement between the City of North Kansas City, Missouri and One North Development, LLC, for a certain development project in the city, and approving a real estate sale and purchase agreement between the City of North Kansas City, Missouri and One North Development, LLC.

All right. Thank you so much for the presentation. Thank you. All right. And with that, the only thing left on the agenda is adjournment. Do we have a motion? So moved.

Second.

All in favor?

Yes.

Any opposed? We are adjourned.