KANNAPOLIS — City leaders announced plans today for a high-end industrial and retail business park at the intersection of N.C. 73 and Crisco Road, the future Kannapolis Parkway.
The city will partner with Mark Pierce Properties Inc., a Charlotte-based commercial real estate company, to develop and market the 100-acre Kannapolis Gateway Business Park near a new Interstate 85 interchange under construction.
Plans include 753,000 square feet of industrial space and 10 acres for retail. Developers will break ground this spring and begin construction on a 50,000-square-foot expandable speculative building this summer.
The city sees the business park as a new first impression for visitors, and projects that when fully developed, the park will account for more than 600 new jobs and will add $50 million to the tax base.
“This is something that has been on the burner for a long time,” Mayor Ray Moss said this morning. “Good things are beginning to happen, it’s just starting.”
MarkPierce has options on the land and the company is the designer and primary developer for the park. The city will buy land from the company and resell it, either to businesses locating in the park or back to MarkPierce, which will lease it.
“Either way, the land will ultimately get back to private ownership and back on the tax rolls, hopefully as soon as possible,” City Manager David Hales said.
Kannapolis has already set aside about $600,000 in federal Community Development Block Grant funds and $300,000 in this year’s budget to buy land and provide infrastructure including water and sewer lines and streets. The city also may apply for about $2 million in federal Housing and Urban Development loans, Hales said.
The pace of development will depend somewhat on how quickly the state builds Kannapolis Parkway, formerly called the Westside Bypass. Workers are grading the route for the road along about 1.8 miles on Crisco Road from I-85 to N.C. 73, a section scheduled to be completed by June of 2002.
Pat Pierce, a partner in MarkPierce, said the company and city have asked the state to push up construction of a segment of the bypass that will run through what is now pasture land and through the heart of the business park. They’re asking that the section from N.C. 73 to Macedonia Church Road be added to the current contract.
The retail portion of the project probably will wait for the bypass. Pierce said the rest, including the speculative building, will be geared toward manufacturing and distribution, with room for corporate office space.
“We just have to sort of wait and see what’s coming our way,” Pierce said of a possible use for the speculative building, which will be built to serve either manufacturing or distribution. “We’ll let the market tell us what that’s going to be.”
He noted that a study by the Cabarrus Economic Development Commission found that speculative buildings in Cabarrus County typically sell or lease in less than a year and determined a need for more such buildings.”
MarkPierce was formed in 1999 by Pierce, a top industrial broker at Childress Klein Properties, and Chip Mark, former executive director at the Charlotte Regional Sports Commission and former Childress Klein retail partner.
The company’s first development deal was an 11,200-square-foot Eckerd drug store on U.S. 29 in China Grove. Since then, MarkPierce has worked on numerous projects, including Rock Hill’s Waterford Business Park and Franklin Square, a huge retail development in Gastonia.
The firm hopes to duplicate its past successes by marketing a new business park with quick access to I-85 and accessibility to Charlotte and its airport, Concord Regional Airport and the Lowe’s Motor Speedway and Concord Mills area.
“Cabarrus County (has) had good activity, and we think Kannapolis can be part of that,” Pierce said.
The opportunity to develop the rural acreage here arose when the state set the final route for the Westside Bypass, a four lane highway that eventually will stretch from N.C. 49 in Concord to Tuckaseegee Road at the Rowan County line.
Kannapolis seized that opportunity when city annexed the 10-square-mile Coddle Creek area in 1999 and zoned nearly 1,000 acres around the location of the business park for industrial use.
“We see the business park as the beginning of what will eventually be commercial, industrial and some retail space that will be closely connected,” Hales said. He said the city envisions greenways connecting factories, distribution centers and offices to stores and restaurants where workers can shop and eat.
City officials call the business park, in an area where Shoe Show is based and Stanley Tools has a distribution center, the first step in an effort to increase economic development, the top goal set by Kannapolis citizens in an 18-month strategic planning process.
And they said the business park, along with other projects in the works, will diversify a tax base traditionally reliant on one major business — Pillowtex, formerly Fieldcrest Cannon — for much of its income.
Additional projects include a planned 217-acre corporate park at I-85 and Kannapolis Parkway near the city’s development. John Whitley, a partner in the Harrisburg firm developing the park, about half of which lies in Kannapolis, said he hopes several race teams will set up shop there.
And the $2.8-million realignment and widening from two to five lanes of Dale Earnhardt Boulevard from I-85 to N.C. 136, moving briskly and scheduled for completion in September, has opened up opportunities there as well, with a business park planned at the interstate.
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