ST. LOUIS • Developer Paul McKee wants to buy the long-dormant Bottle District north of the Edward Jones Dome and add it to his ambitions for the city's north side.
But the way he wants to go about it is raising red flags at City Hall.
The O'Fallon, Mo.-based developer told the Post-Dispatch that he hopes to buy the empty 17-acre site, which sits just a couple of blocks outside the footprint of his 1,100-acre NorthSide proposal, and develop the two in concert. It would be a chance for McKee to gain control of another key piece of real estate — this one near the foot of the new Mississippi River Bridge. It also would be a chance for him to tap more state and local incentives and jump-start his slow-developing NorthSide.
That could happen under legislation filed Friday with city aldermen.
The bill, filed at McKee's request by Aldermanic President Lewis Reed, would give NorthSide rights to the Bottle District's $51 million tax increment financing package, if the sale went through. It would put NorthSide and the Bottle District into a joint "reclamation area," which might also make the Bottle District eligible for state tax credits McKee has tapped to reimburse half the cost of buying land for NorthSide. And it just might be enough to get one, or both, developments off the ground, said Reed's chief of staff, Tom Shepard.
"If it's going to stir either one of those projects to happen faster, better and more effectively, then we're in agreement," he said.
Reed filed the bill because there is currently no alderman representing the 5th Ward, where the Bottle District and most of NorthSide are located. (Former Alderman April Ford-Griffin recently took a job in the mayor's office, and a special election to fill her seat is set for next month.) The bill will need the approval of the aldermanic Housing, Urban Development and Zoning Committee and the full board.
It may not even get that far.
McKee has been negotiating the deal with the St. Louis Development Corp., the city-run agency that oversees TIFs and other redevelopment agreements. The SLDC still has concerns of its own, said executive director Rodney Crim.
"We haven't come to any agreement on anything yet," he said. "The bill they introduced on Friday was a surprise. We'll continue to have discussions, but I anticipate that things about that bill will change."
Crim wouldn't specify what, exactly, the city objects to. But he suggested officials have concerns about using TIF for one project to help fund another.
"My focus is on what can and cannot be done with the Bottle District TIF," he said. "We just have some more talking to do."
If McKee hopes to receive state tax credits for buying the Bottle District, it would behoove him to close the deal by year's end. The Distressed Areas Land Assemblage tax credits — a key piece of McKee's NorthSide financing plan — are capped at $20 million per calendar year and will run out in 2013. After receiving the full allotment in 2009, he applied for just $8 million last year, when legal hurdles slowed his land-buying. So far this year, he has bought little property in the area, according to city records.
It has been more than two years since McKee, a construction magnate who built WingHaven in O'Fallon, unveiled his $8.1 billion plan to redevelop two square miles of the near north side into office buildings, warehouses and thousands of new homes. The development has seen little progress since a nearly $400 million TIF was overturned in court in July 2010, and several other McKee projects have faced lawsuits over unpaid loans.
Meanwhile, he also has been at the center of efforts to turn Lambert-St. Louis International Airport into a hub for Chinese air cargo, efforts that suffered a blow last month, when state lawmakers failed to pass a tax credit program designed to help the hub.
It's unclear whether McKee's plan to buy the Bottle District is contingent upon the TIF bill, or whether he'll go ahead with it regardless. None of the sides in the deal was talking on Monday.
Dan McGuire, a moving company owner who has been trying to develop the Bottle District for a decade, did not return calls. A spokeswoman for Clayco, the Overland-based construction firm that bought into the proposed project in 2007, declined to comment. McKee only answered a few questions by email, saying he didn't want to discuss the plan while it's before the aldermen.
But he did say he thought the site — roughly six blocks of vacant land and two empty buildings now used mostly just for Rams tailgating — meshed nicely with his NorthSide project, especially with its spot near the landing of the new bridge.
"The property was available and I saw the value of marketing and developing both areas under a unified approach," he wrote. "I think that it is the best thing for both development areas and the city."
