ST. LOUIS • At long last, Paul McKee has cleared his legal hurdles in north St. Louis.
The Missouri Supreme Court handed the developer a big win Tuesday when it overturned a lower-court ruling that has blocked for nearly three years his massive plan to remake about 1,500 acres of the city’s North Side.
In the judges tossed out a 2010 ruling that the plan was too vague to justify the state’s largest-ever tax increment financing package.
Now, McKee wants to start construction on the long-awaited project this year, with road and sewer work designed to make sites more attractive to new office tenants and dozens of new homes off North Florissant Avenue in the St. Louis Place neighborhood.
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“The North Side is open for business like we’ve been hoping for a long, long time,†McKee said.
The judges didn’t directly tackle the legality of NorthSide’s $390 million tax increment financing package or TIF law more broadly, instead ruling largely on a procedural issue.
ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ wrote that Circuit Court Judge Robert Dierker “went beyond the scope of the pleadings†in his ruling that NorthSide’s plan lacked the necessary specifics to warrant such huge subsidy. Lawyers for the four neighborhood residents who filed the suit never explicitly made that claim in their complaint, the Supreme Court order noted, but Dierker seized on the issue in his ruling.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs said they were disappointed that the court didn’t rule on the project itself, but they said they have no plans to pursue any more legal action against NorthSide.
“I think at this point the litigation is about over,†said Eric Vickers, who represented two neighborhood residents and later took a job with state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis, who represents the area and supports NorthSide. “The community and everybody is ready to get on to the next step.â€
Bevis Schock, a Clayton attorney who joined the case pro bono, said he had no plans to keep fighting NorthSide either. But he was not optimistic about the project’s future.
“I guess we’ll see over the next 20 years whether anything happens,†he said. “I think we’ll find it will cause further detritus and decay.â€
The three-year delay has not been kind to NorthSide.
A number of buildings in the neighborhood have collapsed, burned down or were dismantled by brick thieves. Only one business — a pipe supplier — has moved into the project area with McKee’s help. And much of the enthusiasm some residents felt for NorthSide back when it was unveiled in 2009 has ebbed.
McKee said he understands why people are frustrated with the slow pace. Now, he said, he has the chance to show them what they’ve been waiting for.
“I think our credibility just went up immensely,†he said. “Now the people of the North Side can hear we’ve been vindicated, and we can do what we’ve said we’re going to do.â€
It will take a little time before work starts, though.
McKee said he plans to ask the city’s TIF Commission and Board of Aldermen for some minor changes to the development agreement, partly to reset the 23-year clock on the TIF, which has been running since 2009. And he will need to activate the TIF and may sell bonds against it to raise money for upgrades to streets and sewers around the site.
The developer said he would like to start that work by the end of the year. He said he also hopes that five homebuilders who he’s partnering with can start work this year on 79 homes they’re planning in St. Louis Place.
Meanwhile, McKee is still buying land, and pushing in Jefferson City to extend a tax credit program that helps him do it. A House committee was slated Tuesday to hold a hearing on a bill that includes over the next six years, targeted to McKee’s NorthSide and a project in Kansas City. It is part of a broader economic development bill the Legislature will consider over the next few weeks.
Tuesday’s ruling may help ensure that the Land Assemblage credits make it in to the final bill, said John Bardgett, a Jefferson City lobbyist who’s working for McKee.
“That’s obviously helpful,†he said. “People will see this thing moving along.â€
City officials also cheered the ruling, noting that McKee can now go about the work of attracting companies to his sites around the foot of the new Mississippi River bridge, the western end of downtown and across several neighborhoods of north St. Louis.
“The TIF’s alive,†said Jeff Rainford, chief of staff to Mayor Francis Slay. “(McKee) can start creating jobs.â€
Despite the controversy, jobs are what this project has always been about, McKee said. Through the last three years he has continued to talk with companies about sites in NorthSide, asking them to be patient while the legal process played out.
“Now that we have the TIF in place,†he said, “I’ve got chips I can use to win these jobs and close these deals.â€
Virginia Young of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.