Thursday, April 19, 2007

Bannister Mall Closing... Wizards Stadium Coming?

Tonight I had this article from KMBZ emailed to me. I've spoken in the past about the possiblity of Bannister Mall being a location for the Wizards, and now things look like they could be moving in that direction.

Apparently, the mall will be closing in about a month's time. The current tenants of the mall, 50 out of 134 retail slots, were sent a letter April 17th telling them of the plans of Donaldson Properties to close the mall. The closing of the mall basically closes all the commercial in an area that for the past 7-10 years has seen a massive down turn in business. At one time, Bannister Mall was the center of shopping for much of the KC area, now it's mainly empty as are the rest of the buildings in the area, as businesses like Montgomery Ward, Wal-Mart, JC Penny's, Toys R' Us, and Best Buy have all moved or just closed.

This paves the way for a possible Wizards stadium. This plan has been rumored for a while. The talks heated up when the Wizards hired Lane4 Property Group to look into the property as a future home for the Wizards. Since then, Lane4 has held one meeting with a local community group about the plans for the area.

The idea of using TIFs to help fund the building of the stadium and commercial complex was supposed to be on the agenda last night at a TIF meeting, but was pulled from the agenda a week ago.

We shall see where this leads, but things are definitely starting to look like KC proper is the favorite to land the Wizards stadium right now.

1 comment:

Taalibah said...

I think it is a darn shame that the owners of Bannister did not let the tenates know before now that they were going to close and tear the place down.

Some of the small business owners had recently moved to different locations in the building. Seems to me that Bannister Mall owners could have let them know before they poured their monies into the business that they struggled to keep afloat.

I was in KCMO a few weeks ago and saw a couple of the tenates working hard to get their places up and runnig.

The tenates should be compensated for the losses they suffer due to the neglegence of Banister Mall owners.

Taalibah