Kansas City-area lawmakers want to give a sales tax break to developers expected to expand a federal facility that builds non-nuclear components to “modernize and refurbish” the nation’s nuclear stockpile.
A bipartisan group of Missouri lawmakers from the metro are promoting legislation to offer a sales tax exemption on materials needed to expand the National Nuclear Security Administration’s existing campus in south Kansas City, which is operated by Honeywell International Inc.
Democratic Sen. Greg Razer told a Missouri Senate committee that the agency, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, plans to add 2.5 million square feet of new facilities and hire thousands of new employees.
Rather than building the expansion itself, Razer said, the federal government will acquire the facilities from a private developer who can build them more quickly. He called it a “smart plan to keep our existing weapons arsenal safe.”
“We need to modernize this to keep them safe to ensure that accidents don’t happen,” Razer said, “and that’s what we will be doing in Kansas City.”
According to a fiscal analysis on Razer’s bill, the National Nuclear Security Administration plans to spend more than $3 billion on Kansas City facilities. Razer’s bill would divert almost $61 million in state revenue over 10 years, which he said the construction job creation alone would offset.
The permanent jobs would then bring in additional state revenue. Jackson County, the city of Kansas City and the Kansas City Zoo would see a combined $81 million diverted from their budgets over 10 years.
If the federal government built the facilities, it would be exempt from paying sales tax anyway, Razer said. Exempting the private developer allows it to keep its costs on par with what the federal government’s would be.
State Reps. Chris Brown, a Republican, and Anthony Ealy, a Democrat, are sponsoring the same legislation in the Missouri House.
The representatives’ bills were combined and passed a House committee unanimously. Razer’s bill also cleared its Senate committee unanimously.
A spokesperson for the National Nuclear Security Agency said in an email that the new facilities would house about 4,000 employees, including existing employers working at other facilities and new hires. Asked how many jobs would be transferred from other facilities and how many new employees would be hired, the spokesperson did not clarify.
The spokesperson said since Honeywell moved to the existing campus in 2014, it experienced “significant growth in workload and personnel to support NNSA’s planned modernization of the nuclear deterrent.”
Now, it’s pursuing the expansion to “expand manufacturing capacity and office space necessary to sustain continued production growth in support of NNSA’s national security mission.”
Construction is expected to begin this year and continue into the next decade.
Kevin Breslin and Terry Anderson appeared before committees in the House and Senate to support the legislation on behalf of the developer, Promontory 150 LLC.
