St. Charles flood plain office/warehouse project seeking tax breaks
By: mschlinkmann@post-dispatch.com">Mark Schlinkmann - St. Louis Post-Dispatch – 5/14/09
Developers are asking the St. Charles City Council to approve reduced property taxes to help pay for a 99-acre warehouse and office park complex in the flood plain at the southeast intersection of Highway 370 and Truman Bouelvard.
The plan by Truman Business Center LLC, headed by Tom Glosier and Jim Zavradinos, includes filling the site with up to 15 feet of soil to raise it above the 100-year Mississippi River flood plain. Part of Truman Boulevard also would be raised. The $41 million project would be the latest in a series of warehouse and light industrial complexes along 370 on low-lying land on St. Charles’ northern fringe and isn’t far from the larger Fountain Lakes and Elm Point developments.
The proposal calls for four office-warehouse buildings of 30,000 to 40,000 square feet each, four multi-use buildings of 70,000 to 90,000 square feet, a 5,000-square-foot trailer sales and rental business, a fast-food/convenience store and a 35,000-square-foot motel. Public improvements would total $4.5 million, including $1.34 million for improvements to Truman Boulevard, $528,000 to alleviate drainage problems involving Sandfort Creek and amounts to extend sewers and utilities to the site - which used to be farmland.
The developers want the city to declare the site blighted and would qualify for 50 percent property tax abatement for 10 years and a possible 10-year extension of the abatement on some of the land. They also want authority for a community improvement district that would allow an extra sales tax of up to 1 cents to be charged at the site. A completion date of 2017 has been set.
Tom Cunningham, an attorney for the city involved in negotiating the proposal, said at a council meeting Tuesday that the plan would require the public improvements to be completed in two years. He added that if the owners failed to develop 400,000 square feet of leasable space in eight years, the tax abatement “goes away.”
Councilman Jerry Reese, a supporter of the bill, said residents would benefit from the improvements to Truman Boulevard. Others said even with the tax abatements, the city and other taxing jurisdictions would get much more tax revenue than they do now from the site.
St. Charles school superintendent Randy Charles and Carl Sandstedt of the city-county library district both appeared at the meeting and said they had gotten little advance notice of the proposal and were there to get more information. Sandstedt said “it seems like there is a component here of public good” in the plan but also observed that the farther east you go in St. Charles County, the more tax-break plans for developers have been approved over the years. “When some people don’t pay, other people do pay,’ he said, referring to a resulting shift in the share of the tax burden borne by other parts of the county.
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