He’s No Angel

Before the Reeders arrived, the city had tried once before to lend a generous hand to a developer who dared to dream on Vista del Rio. In the late '90s, developers wanted to turn the building into a Sheraton hotel. The Kansas City Council approved tax-increment financing, a scheme that allows developers to skim their future property taxes. But the developers couldn't obtain the rest of the financing they needed, and the building became the property of a Kansas bank.

Powerful forces encouraged the PIEA to get a deal done with the Reeders. William Dietrich, the president and CEO of the Downtown Council, a coalition of major property owners, wrote a letter to Figuly a year ago and rhapsodized that "restoration of this project will send another strong signal to the community that Downtown is on the rebound."

"If there was some opportunity to get something done, people were really wanting to get it done, because it was a huge, huge eyesore," Figuly says.

Figuly says there were concerns about what Wayne Reeder could and could not do. He is, after all, a developer from a sunny climate whose real-estate projects -- golf courses, storage facilities, mobile-home parks, as well as apartments and condominiums -- have tended to stay close to the ground. The View is a high-rise that needs to withstand all of the whims of Midwest weather.

And there is the niggling matter of Reeder's occasional bust-out. Figuly says there are provisions in the contract that detail how development rights are to be reassigned if the View is not completed. In the meantime, Figuly prefers to look at the positive. "He's already got four floors done -- that's four more than were done a year ago."