With Overland Park’s plans to move city hall to the College Boulevard and Metcalf area and Black & Veatch’s plan for a new, $1 billion headquarters, attention is back on long-range plans to reimagine the center of the city.
Historically defined by large office users, the corridor has been a hot topic for many years as Overland Park ponders the future of the area around its convention center — dubbed OP Central.
“We’ve spent a lot of time on this corridor thinking about how it can transition into the future,” Mayor Curt Skoog said during a recent Overland Park City Council meeting.
The city’s current vision, crafted through multiple planning processes, is to remake some of the underutilized office developments that have traditionally served as the city’s primary industry into a more vibrant, mixed-use area with amenities to serve both workers and visitors.
How did Overland Park get here?
Nearly 20 years ago, Overland Park adopted its Vision Metcalf plan, which aimed to revitalize the city’s economic backbone. A few years later, it was clear that some of the ideas that came out of that could be applied to College Boulevard as well, said Leslie Karr, director of planning for Overland Park, particularly where it intersects with Metcalf.
As a major economic hub — one of the most densely packed job centers in the metro area — Overland Park considers this corridor to be key to its long-term fiscal health and the success of its primary industry of office.
But the past focus on offices alone in the area posed a threat to the corridor’s long-term viability, especially as the idea of office work continues to evolve.
Karr said the city was starting to hear from the Overland Park Chamber of Commerce and Visit OP — the city’s tourism arm — about how the changing needs of both office users and business travel could affect the office industry about 10 years ago.
Councilmember Jim Kite, who represents this area of the city, said it started to become clear that the city needed to “reimagine a very sterile intersection” at College and Metcalf and the surrounding area.
“It was just big, tall glass buildings and a handful of restaurants, and it just wasn’t what it could be,” he said.
Eventually, those considerations prompted the city to contract with a consultant to craft what is now called the OP Central Master Plan with the support of a federal Planning Sustainable Places grant via the Mid-America Regional Council. The 2018 plan called for reimagining the corridor with new mixed-use development and redevelopment that would prioritize people living, working and playing in one area.
“It used to be just an office building in a field was kind of the ideal, and now people want to be able to walk to lunch and walk to other services and have a place after work to go with coworkers and socialize or entertain clients,” Karr said.
Going beyond office uses in the OP Central area
Karr said those ideas in past planning efforts will help the city create an “18-hour environment.”
“Instead of everybody coming there, working for the day, leaving at 5 p.m., you have reasons for people to be supporting retail and restaurants beyond those hours,” she said. “You create some more activity and things for people to do along the corridor.”
All of that led the city to focus on implementation, resulting in the 2021 College + Metcalf Mobility Study that emphasized walkability, and more recent efforts to create a special zoning district in the area similar to the downtown district that’s now been wrapped up in a general city-wide development code update.
“If we want this city to have … the gathering places, the magnets to draw interest to this community,” Kite said, “the area right there at that intersection and along College has to be reimagined.”
He added that he believes the current focus on more mixed-use and walkable uses is “the right approach.” Kite also said that with the convention center in the corridor, and now with city hall planned nearby, Overland Park has a vested interest in ensuring it all comes together.
On top of all of that, Karr said, since the area is already pretty densely packed, it could be a good fit for denser housing options, like multistory apartment buildings. That would allow the city to capitalize on other goals related to adding more places to live without touching residents who are opposed to such projects.
Overland Park could pursue OP Central sales tax incentives
Additionally, Overland Park has started exploring the possibility of imposing special, limited sales taxes that could, if ultimately adopted, help reimburse the city for some of the expenses incurred from the purchase of the new city hall site. It could also potentially help pay for long-term mobility enhancements long planned in the corridor.
Earlier this month, City Attorney Michael Koss said using sales taxes — in the form of a Transportation Development District and/or a Community Improvement District — to help pay for the upgrades in line with the College Metcalf Mobility Study.
“We think it has the potential to help achieve city objectives in this area and benefit our residents,” Koss said.
The details related to all of that are still being sorted out, especially in light of potentially overlapping incentive requests from Black & Veatch that include a CID sales tax as well as existing incentives on the Galleria 115 development area. Koss suggested that the city and private entities could submit a joint petition or share the sales tax revenues.
Still, the city council gave preliminary support on July 7 for staff to start negotiating with the goal of capping all combined incentive sales taxes at 2%. To actually form the districts, the issue will have to return to the city council for full approval.
$5.3M in mobility improvements planned next year
In the meantime, Overland Park has scheduled about $5.3 million in corridor enhancements for sometime next year, focused particularly on improving bike and foot access around College and Metcalf.
According to the city’s capital improvement plan for next year, the project’s primary goal is “enhancing active transportation choices to connect employees, visitors and residents to employment, hotels and other amenities along the corridor.”
It will include:
- a new linear park — a long and skinny public green space — on College
intersection upgrades - multiuse paths to connect College to a trail
- more bike and pedestrian connections
- more visible crosswalks and wayfinding signs
Overland Park is set to receive $1.35 million in federal funds via MARC for the project. Work is expected to wrap up by the end of 2026.
Plus, the 2018 mobility study called for other potential improvement projects focused on pedestrian access that the city hasn’t ruled out entirely, including a possible footbridge over Metcalf.
Karr said, with Overland Park investing millions of dollars into its new city hall project in the corridor, the city has “a lot of opportunity” to continue pondering additional mobility upgrades, new amenities and other types of enhancements as well.
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