Black & Veatch’s complete overhaul and redevelopment of its central Overland Park headquarters cleared a key hurdle this week.
The project — located at 11401 Lamar Avenue — features close to one million square feet of office space, more than 150,000 square feet of commercial space, around 550 residential units, a hotel, more than 4,000 parking spaces in structured garages and paved lots, as well as space for what will eventually become a park.
This multi-phase project would take the place of the offices that Black & Veatch currently uses on its 22-acre property near Lamar and College Boulevard.
A large chunk of that property is currently taken up by paved parking, a defining feature of the suburban office hub around College Boulevard and Metcalf Avenue that city officials have said they want to move away from.
On Monday, the Overland Park Planning Commission voted 10-0 to recommend approval of a rezoning and preliminary development plan for the Black & Veatch project, a big step in what promises to be one of the city’s most-watched developments in the coming years.
Chair Kip Strauss was absent from the meeting, prompting Commissioner Radd Way, usually the vice chair, to fill in.
What is Black & Veatch proposing?
The mixed-use district, formally dubbed the Overland Park Plaza II, will be laid out in a grid pattern, which is intended to be walkable, a priority city officials have long touted for that part of the city.
It would be built over multiple phases, beginning with a new, 10-story headquarters building for Black & Veatch. Then, the existing office building would be demolished.
In all, according to city planning documents, Black & Veatch is proposing building:
- 988,850 total square feet of office space, some of which will be the firm’s new headquarters
- 163,396 square feet of commercial space
- 102 townhome units
- 457 multifamily units
- a 160-room hotel
- 3,768 parking spaces in multiple structured garages and 254 surface parking spaces (a significant reduction in surface-level space dedicated to parking from what is currently there)
- and two acres of parkland, fronted by a proposed “festival street” that could be closed for events
To help cover the cost of all of that, Black & Veatch has requested around $280 million in incentives through a slew of public financing tools, amounting to about a quarter of the total estimated project price tag of more than $1 billion. It would be one of, if not the, largest incentive packages ever approved in Overland Park.
No incentives for the project have been finalized.
Alongside all of the new construction, the city will require Black & Veatch to make some traffic improvements around the site, including:
- Adding left-in-only turn lanes on 115th Street
- Adding a traffic signal at 115th and Lamar Avenue, with a right turn lane and another at 112th Street and Lamar with left turn lanes
- Re-striping a section of Lamar Avenue in the vicinity to convert the four-lane road into a three-lane road with a two-way left turn lane
- Adding right turn lanes to Lamar
- Adding on-street parallel parking at multiple locations on the periphery of the site
Commission sees Black & Veatch project as “positive” move
Broadly, commissioners were supportive of the plan as presented on Monday, though several said they wanted more detailed information about the project, lamenting a lack of conceptual renderings and drawings for specific parts of the redevelopment.
Nonetheless, the members of the commission were unanimous in their support, with many saying they viewed it as a turning point for the wider corridor around College Boulevard.
“It’s a great way to revitalize this tract,” Commissioner Ned Reitzes said. “You think about the current Black & Veatch campus, and you think of the sea of surface parking, and I think it’s going to certainly be an improvement to get rid of a lot of that.”
Commissioner Holly Streeter-Schaefer agreed, voicing support for the mixed-use plan.
“I think it will be a positive to this entire corridor that we’ve really been trying to update and upgrade for a number of years,” she said.
Next steps:
- The rezoning application goes to the Overland Park City Council for consideration next. It is currently scheduled for the Nov. 3 meeting.
- City staff and Black & Veatch are still negotiating a redevelopment agreement that outlines the terms of the incentives, timelines and other details, like who will be responsible for the proposed park.
- That will need to go through the Overland Park City Council’s Finance, Administration and Economic Development Committee, as well as the city council, for approval.
- Later, some additional details, like design and amended site layouts, will need to be settled at the time of the final development plan.
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