Springfield City Council has approved a bill to allow the city to issue Chapter 100 Taxable Industrial Development Revenue Bonds of up to $32 million for a new Andy’s Frozen Custard headquarters. But the vote came after three amendments were introduced and failed.
One amendment by Councilman Bruce Adib-Yazdi would have required the general contractor to keep track of how many local workers were part of the construction project.
Another by Councilman Brandon Jenson would have moved the vote to the September 21 meeting. That would have allowed the city to come up with an incentive package to try to keep Andy’s corporate offices downtown.
"It is critically important that we continue to support development and redevelopment within the downtown area," he said. "And so, I find it really difficult for us to stand up and say, we believe in downtown. We want it to be better. We're doing everything we can, but then we turn around and tell the community, whenever a business says we can't stay downtown, oh, we're going to give you $4.4 million to help support you in moving out of our downtown, that it's hypocritical and it's not something we can support or it's not something we should support."
Amanda Ohlensehlen, director of Workforce and Economic Vitality for the City of Springfield, said that Andy’s currently rents the space they’re in downtown. They talked with Andy's about potentially staying downtown, but she said it just wasn't feasible with the corporate campus they are envisioning.
"So, that does include the three office buildings, which is about 43,000-square-feet of office space, as well as an industrial warehouse around 9,600-square-feet of industrial warehouse space," she said. "So, the footprint that they have is a 10-acre site. It is really difficult to find contiguous sites within downtown that would be able to accommodate that and also be consistent with the comprehensive plan and the downtown plan.
Jenson said he put forth the amendment because he believes the community isn’t getting "the public benefit it deserves from this type of corporate welfare." He said he feels the 16 new jobs the project is expected to create aren’t enough for city council to support issuing the bonds.
Councilman Craig Hosmer said he wished Springfield City Council could have been involved in the process early on.
"Andy's is a good corporate citizen...they do a lot of charitable things with schools, with — they hire local contractors. They also provide — there's a lot of good things that we could do to make this, I think, even a better an agreement, better for the city," he said. "And I think actually even better for Andy's. But I think it feels like that we were sort of cut out of that process."
He said he knows it wasn't intentional but wondered if they could be brought into similar future conversations earlier to which Ohlensehlen replied that they are exploring ways to do that. He wondered if that might prevent amendments late in the process.
Councilman Abe McGull pointed out that there's nothing in the city's ordinances that requires city council to be involved until a bill is presented to them. Ohlensehlen said that this measure isn't inconsistent with similar projects in the past.
And McGull pushed back on the amendments that were presented.
"I mean, in my opinion, in my own personal opinion, I don't see where are we doing ourself any favors? Because now we're trying to micromanage businesses on where they should locate, where they should, you know, make these day-to-day decisions on where they should locate their next property," he said.
The measure passed with only Jenson and Adib-Yazdi voting against it.
