A TALE OF TWO PRINTING PLANTS.

With war clouds on the horizon and uncertain economic times, it's not unusual that two publishers half-way acros the country from one another would view building and plant expansion in different ways. Here are examples of these extremes:

*In Missouri, Knight Ridder's Kansas City Star recently handed out the contract for designing and building a new $199 million production complex in downtown Kansas City.

The Austin Co. of Cleveland, Ohio, will handle the planning and execution phases of the project destined to provide the newspaper with 424,000 square feet of production space.

The new facility will house four, nine-unit, 36-tower Commander offset printing press from Koenigh & Bauer AG of Germany, valued by analysts at between $60 million and $70 million.

The Star deal is the largest sale KBA has made in the United States; its presses are used at Ohio's Dayton Daily News and Utah's Ogden Standard-Examiner and the company has sold presses to the Desert Sun in Palm Springs, Calif., the Courier and Press of Evansville, Ind., and North Carolina's Fayetteville Observer.

The building is set to cover two city blocks and will overlook a freeway loop and office buildings. The newspaper building will be sheathed in glass and passers-by and office workers will be able to watch the press running. The new plant will be about two blocks away from the paper's existing offices and the paper has sought $19 million in tax incentives across a 10-year time period. In addition, the paper plans to seek enterprise-zone benefits.

Arthur Brisbane, the newspaper's publisher, was quoted last year as saying that building a plant in a suburban area would have been cheaper and easier, but that the paper has a 122-year history of being in downtown Kansas City.

"We have a long-term presence downtown," Brisbane was quoted in his own newspaper as saying. "And we believe in the importance of downtown and the future of downtown."

*In Seattle, a newspaper has relinquished its rights to street space it had acquired in 1996 to build a twin-tower building and parking garage for 1700 employees.

The Times, which in a joint operating agreement handles the non-editorial functions of the Hearst Corp.'s Post-Intelligencer in addition to its own, decided that the project wasn't in the cards and sought a refund of more than what it paid to the city for the "street vacation" rights that would have combined with other real estate to expand the paper's campus to more than 41/2 blocks.

Last Monday, the Seattle City Council voted unanimously to give the paper $1.2 million, which would cover the value of the land plus interest.

The deal between the newspaper and the city had been structured so that if the paper changed its mind within 10 years it could get its money back.

The proposed construction would have given the paper a new printing plant, 500,000 square feet of office space and a 570,000-square-foot parking garage. In its story on the issue the Times said the paper had lost money in the last three years and quoted its own spokeswoman as saying that the recession played a part in the company's decision.

"We're still slightly downsized, and the recession is going to be around for a while," Kerry Coughlin was quoted by the paper as saying. "The times have changed. Our needs have changed. And we've determined we are not going forward with the overall development envisioned in 1996."

The Times story said the company may expand its existing offices in the future.

Though Seattle is more ancedotal evidence that the advertising recession is hurting capital investment, the Kansas City story is more the industry norm. In addition to KC, Knight Ridder also recently green-lighted a press expansion in Detroit (where it's in a JOA with Gannett) and the aformentioned Dayton Daily News made a significant investment in press upgrades. Was the Times willing to give up its valuable land rights just to prove it's losing money (which would help it break its JOA deal with Hearst)? Only time will tell.