United States: Planned Industrial Expansion Authority OKs agreement for NNSA plant.

Byline: shiv03

After listening to speeches, a poem and a rap song encouraging them not to, the Planned Industrial Expansion Authority voted unanimously Friday to approve a development agreement with Centerpoint-Zimmer LLC for the construction of a 1.5 million-square-foot plant for the National Nuclear Security Administration at Missouri Highway 150 and Botts Road.

Pending final approval by the Kansas City Council and closings on bond issues early next year, construction on the $673 million project is expected to commence in March. It will replace an aging plant in the Bannister Federal Complex that serves as the primary U.S. source for manufacturing, assembling and procuring non-nuclear components needed to maintain the nation s nuclear stockpile.

In what had to be a first during a PIEA meeting, rappers Theodore Priest Hughes and Desmond 337 Jones, who call themselves The Recipe, performed a rap song titled Self-Destruction. It cautioned against providing millions of dollars worth of incentives for a new plant contributing to the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.

They were pretty good, said Bryan Cave LLP lawyer Stephen Sparks, who represents the PIEA. But PIEA board member Charles Erickson said the facility was going to be built regardless of Kansas City s support, and if we don t do it, somebody else is going to do it someplace else.

Sparks said that financial documents relating to the project won t be produced until the first or second quarter of next year. But he said the project would require two bond issues. The first issue, placed by the city, would provide $40 million for infrastructure improvements that have been required as part of the project approval.

The second, which would provide more than $600 million for construction of the proposed five-building NNSA campus, will be placed by Centerpoint-Zimmer LLC, a partnership between Zimmer Real Estate Services LLC and CenterPoint Property Trust, which the General Services Administration selected as project developer in March.

The bonds placed by Centerpoint-Zimmer will be supported by a 20-year lease of the new campus by the GSA, at the rate of about $58.9 million a year.

Plans call for the PIEA to take ownership of the campus during the 20-year lease term. It will be leased to the developer and subleased to GSA for use by the NNSA. After the 20 years, the developer will take ownership of the building.

The development agreement, because it involves a private developer, also calls for the project to generate $5.2 million a year in payments in lieu of property taxes. That money will be split equally between debt service on the public infrastructure improvements and payments to local taxing jurisdictions.

The new plant will retain about 2,500 Kansas City jobs with an average salary of $95,000. By enabling NNSA to move from its current 3.2 million-square-foot plant to a smaller, more modern space, the plant also is expected to generate $100 million in annual oper

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