On Aire Ep. 15 w/ John DeHardt and John Peterson of Astra Enterprise Park Transcript

[Intro – Host: Team Jensen]

Host: teaching you the art of industrial real estate this is on air with Team Jensen all right all right hello listeners welcome to episode 15 of on air the art of industrial real estate here with Team Jensen today I’m very excited to bring on the group from Sunflower Redevelopment LLC who are the owners of Astra Enterprise Park which if you aren’t familiar this is where Panasonic has located their new EV battery plant out in De Soto Kansas but today we have the managing partner with John DeHardt with us as well as another partner John Peterson and Dan Jensen as well who the listeners are very familiar with

John DeHardt & John Peterson: thanks for having us.

Host: excited to kind of dive into it today and before we jump into all the cool things going on with Astra… wanted to kind of just touch on your two backgrounds and how you’ve been handling this project really for longer than I think a lot of folks realize.

[The Origin Story of Sunflower Redevelopment] John DeHardt: I am the managing partner at kessinger Hunter I joined the firm in 1982… over those years we have done a lot of work with John Peterson who is a former real estate attorney and a partner in Sunflower Redevelopment… John had a former client that almost got a deal done for the Sunflower Army Ammunition plant over 20 years ago and when that deal fell apart… one day we looked at one another and said why don’t we try to make that same deal and we did and that was 19 years ago when we closed on that transaction with the Army and with Johnson County and the state of Kansas.

John Peterson: I am a recovering attorney… after a lot of work, lot of negotiations with many government agencies—the Army, the EPA, Kansas Department of Health and Environment, the governor’s office, the county chair—we finally find ourselves in a position where remediation is on the downside towards being complete… it’s kind of fun to now turn around to the lawyers and tell them they’re too expensive.

[The Massive Scale of Astra Enterprise Park] Dan: before we go there let’s just back up a second just for people who don’t know this is a 9,000 acre tract of ground that was used as a former Munitions plant during World War Two through Korea and Vietnam… what we took title to originally was approximately 9,000 Acres of which approximately 3,000 acres are going to be given to the county parks and the local state universities… so we’re down now to 6,000 Acres… this area is as big as the city of Leawood just about… it’s gigantic.

John DeHardt: we have 6,000 contiguous acres in one of the really most prolific counties in the United States… sits on a four-lane divided State Highway with quick access to two different interstate highways.

[Key Assets: Water Rights and BNSF Rail] John DeHardt: we have our own water access from the Kansas River… it’s about a six-mile pipeline off our site to the river which we own the rights to… water rights in this day and age are extremely valuable… and then we’ve got a rail line off the BNSF Main line through town into our site and we own the entirety of the Short Line.

John Peterson: while we have not yet finalized a business deal with Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad… that is an exciting part that we hope to finalize hopefully in the next few weeks where we’ll have rail service to this park.

[Utility-Scale Solar and Renewable Energy] John Peterson: this is an agreement we reached several years ago with a local solar developer [Savion] to put the South half of our 6,000 acres under solar panels and so it’s going to be one of the biggest utility scale solar arrays anywhere in the country… nearly 3,000 Acres… that represents about 450 to 500 megawatts of power.

John DeHardt: power availability is becoming the new water availability issue that developers are grappling with all over the United States… Evergy, the local public utility, is building a substation as we speak on our site, on our dirt, that will be 50 acres in size… Savion will be bringing their power to that substation for redistribution… you want Renewable Power, we have Renewable Power.

[The De Soto Annexation and Tiff District] John Peterson: we finally turned our attention to the little community of De Soto, Kansas… we allowed them to take over and upgrade the water treatment plant that was part of the Army Installation originally… it has become the city’s water treatment facility… we said we’ll be willing to allow you to annex our 9,000 Acres… the ask was that they would create a tax increment financing District… not only do we have the biggest building under construction in the state of Kansas by far with Panasonic, we have the largest TIF District that has ever been created in the state of Kansas.

[Workforce Pipeline and Targeted Industries] John Peterson: we’re focused on high-tech type of industries, power-intensive industries, and information type industries so we would certainly hope to have data centers at our site… large-scale high-tech manufacturers.

John DeHardt: the universities and the local junior colleges really combined together to start immediately providing educational opportunities… there’ll be 4,000 people working at Panasonic… we were told some time ago of those 4,000 employees, a thousand of them would be Engineers.

[The Remediation Challenge] Host: is there a challenge or a particular challenge in mind that you guys could speak to?

John Peterson: nobody has tried to take on a project of this magnitude, not the EPA, not the Army, to where you have 6,000 Acres with a private entity that owns it… the explosives are gone, they’ve been gone a long time ago… it was mostly propellants, it wasn’t the bombs themselves… the challenge was there was a lot of it and it was spread out in different parts of the site so it was the magnitude of clean up… where we get hung up a little bit is the Army… it’s getting the paperwork through all the different agencies to bring back that no further action letter… sometimes the lag is paperwork, not necessarily the work.

[Wrap-Up] John Peterson: this project, Astra Enterprise Park, is being marketed by kessinger Hunter…

Host: if anyone wants to learn more about the park, what’s the best way to look up information?

John Peterson: you can go to the kessinger hunter website and there is also a link from our website there to Astra Enterprise Park…

Host: well, thanks very much John and John for coming on with us… that’s episode 15.