No MLS Stadium for STL But Score for Paul McKee
Date Posted: June 26, 2017
Posted In: News, Projects,
From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: St. Louis may have missed a chance to build a Major League Soccer stadium and lure a team, but developer Paul McKee still managed to score.
The push to win an MLS team earlier this year gave McKee’s NorthSide Regeneration and its primary lender, the Bank of Washington, more leverage over the city.
To help pay for the proposed stadium, the city needed McKee to agree to let the city use a portion of the tax-increment financing revenue generated from development within his 1,500-acre NorthSide Regeneration TIF.
In exchange for that concession, NorthSide received over a year of extra time to begin work in the massive redevelopment area first approved by the city in 2009. Under his agreement with the city, signed in February, McKee now has until September 2018 to commence at least $5 million worth of development.
In addition, the city agreed to give NorthSide the chance to buy or lease the Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission land that was to be the site of the MLS stadium. The city has to at least try to finalize an option to purchase the land, even without the MLS team, and then offer it to NorthSide, according to a copy of the February agreement obtained by the Post-Dispatch.
While voters rejected a key portion of the stadium’s financing plan tied to a higher use tax, the efforts to try to win a soccer stadium, hashed out in the waning days of former Mayor Francis Slay’s administration, tied St. Louis even closer to McKee and a lender that holds some $50 million of his debt.
Just a year earlier, the Slay administration had turned to McKee to help land a major economic development prize, the future western headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The NGA and its 3,100 jobs was seen as a potential game-changer for part of north St. Louis.