July 11, 2017 — Meeting Transcript

Sub-district 2B is located on Forsyth Boulevard, directly west of Carambolette Plaza. It is .88 acres in size and will be developed into a corporate civic auditorium structure which includes 1,000 auditorium seats and a multi-function lobby area. The assembly area of the auditorium is approximately 94,160 gross square feet. The three levels will be located above grade and two levels will be located below grade. The total height of the structure is 74.25 feet, measured from average existing grade to the mean elevation of the shared sling roof. The area of building within sub-district 2D includes support space and is 110,400 square feet. The individual sub-district plans provide detailed information related to each specific phase of the development. Each sub-district requires the approval of a sub-district development plan by the Board of Aldermen, a site plan review by the Planning Commission, an architectural review by the Architectural Review Board. The previously approved Special Development District Plan for the entire multi-phase project includes development standards regarding the use, area, height and parking associated with the proposed development. The Board of All Women has the authority to determine a Sub-District Development Plan's conformance with the Special Development Plan. Once approved, the sub-district development plan and ordinance becomes the specific zoning regulations governing the use and development of the property in that sub-district. The following table lists the applicable development standards from approved special development plan and staff assessment as to whether proposed sub-district developing plan complies with each standard. The corporate civic auditorium and commercial use does comply with the standard. The 569,478 gross square feet doesn't apply with the standard. No more than 100 feet of building height doesn't apply with standard. And total allowable for all sub-districts of 5,800 parking spaces doesn't apply with this standard. According to the city's contracted architect, the proposed project appears to be generally well designed, high quality building that exhibits instinctive, identifiable characteristics. The proposed project will be a significant positive addition to the area and downtown as a whole. The existing stormwater runoff according to the MSD 15 year 20 minute calculation is 1.5 cubic feet per second. The proposed runoff is 3.11 cubic feet per second, which represents an increase of 1.61 cubic feet per second. Stormwater runoff from the site will be hiked directly to the public storm system. Public Works Department has reviewed the site plans and finds the stormwater plan acceptable. Subdistricts 1 and 2A will provide the required parking in support of Subdistrict 2B. Pedestrian circulation in and out of the auditorium will be provided through the main entrance located in the Subdistrict 2A building and the secondary access point along Ron Webb Plaza. The special development plan requires 250 parking spaces, which were provided in the sub-district 2A garage and overflow parking provided in the sub district 1 garage. The special development plan require four loading spaces and three proposed underneath the building with access provided on . The special development plan Bicycle parking racks and 13 are provided. The racks will be distributed between an outdoor location on Carolina Black Plaza near the stage door and within sub-district to a garage. Subdistrict 2D is in the Forsyth Village District area identified in the Downtown Master Plan. The vision of the district is to create a dense, walkable, mixed-use district including a significant new urban residential development oriented around the Forsyth Metro Link Station with appropriate connections to the existing development in Caratawet Plaza and the adjacent neighborhoods. The plan identifies both Forsyth Boulevard and Carondelet Plaza as pedestrian priority zones. Staff believes the project complies with the vision of the Downtown Master Plan. On June 19, 2017, the Planning Commission voted 5-0 to recommend approval of the Subdistrict Development Plan to the Board of Aldermen with a number of conditions that are listed in your agenda report. It is staff's recommendation this evening to conduct a public hearing and adopt an ordinance approving the special development sub-district plan for sub-district 2B pursuant to the following recommendations. That the property identified as sub-district be developed in accordance with the approved plans dated June 30th, 2017 as amended pursuant to the conditions listed below and that the project is subject to certain development standards including but not limited to those identified in page G001 special development districts sub-district 2B plans dated June 30, 2017. One, final streetscape design shall be approved by City of Clayton Public Works Department. Number two, the electrical and irrigation system shall be connected from Subdistrict 2A. Number three, to remove all the material from the streetscape easement that does not conform to city streetscape standards. Number four, the sidewalk shall be per city streetscape standards, number five, street improvements adjacent to Subdistrict 2B shall be implemented prior to completion of Subdistrict 2D. Number six, the city's traffic engineering consultant is updating the TIA traffic impact statement to consider the changes made to the site plan. So improvements shall include that are not limited to the following. A, the four-side three-striping and or widening to accommodate lane configuration improvements provide a westbound left turn lane on four-side bull bar at the sub-district 2A garage entrance. B, implement signal re-timing optimization program. Extent of signals beyond adjacent streets that may need to be optimized is to be termed by the City of Clayton Public Works Department. Number seven, the applicant shall provide a landscape plan including a planting schedule for review by the city contracts with landscape architect prior to the issue of the building permits. The landscape plan shall address comments and markups from the review letter dated June 12th, 2017. Number eight, the applicant shall provide one additional loading dock space, the location of which shall be approved by the city at or before the timing of moving permit review.

Okay, who's here from the applicant? Come on up and introduce yourself please.

Good evening. My name is Travis Knight. I'm the staff VP of Facilities and Real Estate for 17. And I'm thrilled to be here this evening and talk to you about this exciting project that we have planned. And along with Eli Hoisington of HOK, we're going to be working together on this consideration. So, of course, I want to thank you in advance for your time. Thank you so much for your time. So I probably don't need to share many details about the extension of this, but we'll look at those details several times. All I will say is that we're continuing to grow at a record pace and we're excited to have claimed continuity at Center for the Growth to grow.

Travis, hold on one second. Can everybody hear who we have

here? No. We all right? Is the big mic working? This big mic is working. Is that better?

All right, so

We feel that this project that we're going to be presenting tonight is just a further evidence of Centene's commitment to the community of Clayton. We've been a long time supporter of the community in general, and particularly as it relates to the arts. So what we're going to be proposing to you today, and what has been reviewed by the Architectural Review Board already, is a world-class facility to support not only the training and meeting needs of Centene Corporation, but also to provide accommodations for a variety of performing arts activities in the city. Like I said, including our training, but also global broadcasting capabilities as well as a variety of community performing arts events. Our commitment includes providing for over 100 of these types of events to occur each year, and we're excited about this opportunity to present such a facility, and we hope you share our views in that way. So now Eli is going to share a little more detail about the project and answer any questions we have.

First off, thank you for the taller mic. I had to hold this thing as I walked around last time. So I appreciate that. Thank you as well for your time and consideration this evening, Mayor. All of them appreciate the opportunity to come and build on what Travis has said and talk about this project. Actually, before I go into the show, just a quick highlight of what we're going to cover tonight. A very, very brief review of the RSVP that covering the detail and how this fits into that. The advancement for the SD2B, which is the auditorium we're going to talk about, and how that has influenced in what we came back and talked to the architectural review board with SD2A briefly so you can see the whole picture of this overall development. So this is our recap. This was a very new last. We're in front of all of you in January 10th of this year looking at the overall situation And so we're focused on the green block with the black letters SD2B as the next piece here for us to talk about since we moved through the purple stuff with urine. So this is its overall setting, the rendering that you've seen, the aerial watercolor. And as I said a few weeks ago, that kind of mouse-shaped thing was where we left you. committed to at the time was coming back with a design that was representative of the desires of the overall Special Development District and that would reflect all these programmatic things that we said we would do as we sought approval for this project. And so we're going to share with you some vision on the architecture, and then obviously just answer any questions that may come up as a result of it. This was an early sketch that turned into one of these project surroundings of what this object could be. The idea of an iconic form, something that was representative of the neighborhood's materiality. something that was respectful of the scale and the character of the district, but also something that reflected a lot of activity and public excitement. And it's one of the things that I think is particularly interesting about this project from an architectural perspective, is these buildings, as you've probably all been to a lot of them, they tend to not do that. They tend to be very closed because it's a black box, you go into the theater. And so the idea of the vision of Clayton as a very active and pedestrian world, how did we accommodate that with sort of the programmatic need of a building that was sort of inward looking? We did a couple things, and I'm going to talk about turning this building inside out, which is kind of what we've done. The first thing we also, as we talked about the mass and the height of it, was to illustrate to everyone here It's kind of like an iceberg, a little bit, if you think about it. A great deal of this building is actually below this white dashed line. So this white dashed lines indicates the slope of Forsyth and the street level. So you can see that about half of the building, half of it is a drive. This very large space is low grade. And the volume of the large terracotta masonry object really encloses all of the great things that we'll need to do what Travis was telling me. a variety of centene functions, performances, lectures, media, but accommodations for just about anything that we do. Why is this important? Well, it makes the building obviously sit very nicely within context. As Craig said, about 70 foot give or take on average of that is about a grade. But it's also incredibly accessible. So people who come here, they could be the general public. You can walk basically the level of the you would come in at. All of it is slope surfaces, and so you're not faced with a huge flight of stairs as a patron. You come here, you can walk directly into the balcony level. You can see how that white dashed line moves that circle. Or you can go down this gentle slope of ramps to the rear orchestra level. So the idea of an accessible, not just for centene, but for all patrons was a really important thing that we thought about. And then really as we came back and looked at the overall plan, the garage in its general size wasn't fairly consistent, but what we felt it needed was the opportunity to look at this one piece of architecture, that it wasn't just sort of two buildings, but the whole block had character. So this blue arrow really hints at what did we do to do that. The key to the decision was that vertical red line is really the delineation between 2A and 2B. And a big move we made was to pull the main entrance, the box office, and some of the parking entrance from 2B into 2A so that this whole street frontage really became much, much more active instead of it all just being sort of bifurcated down that lane. In general, the overall feel, as Greg pointed out, is consistent with the group's SDD. So you can see here at the top images where we're in January, and the bottom images that develop, you can actually see the sculpting of that auditory form. So we moved, obviously, into much more technical drawings and a little bit more detail for the level of work we have to commit to here. So this is a rendering of the overall project that stands at the corner. This is kind of that corner over by the WashU Center looking back at what we call the prow of this building. So you can see how it's very deliberately stepping down to essentially about a two-story hall, and it comes around the street. So that's kind of that last step that we talked about, the appropriateness of scale. It's a highly transparent facade, so I'll get into talking about the planning of this a little bit. We set the auditorium function as this object, and we kind of set it mid-block, and then we've wrapped this highly accessible concourse, walkways, places for people to be conversing, talking, breaking out in the show, particularly at this crowd. We've wrapped the whole building in that public sequence. So there was an attitude that, at this important part of the city, that the building didn't have a back. you know, it couldn't turn it back on current lead more than it could turn it back on foresight. And so we said, well, it won't happen. We're going to have this sort of consistent kind of front at this key site. As we came around to the garage itself and started looking at how this front and affected the south side, this is actually reflective of a couple comments we had in the Arabia about adding some pre-escape and about we're going to be looking at treating that facade in a slightly different way. The importance was for continuity of that architectural vision from Forsyth as it wrapped around the building. So although this sets the stage for development we're not here to talk about, it has to have a presence certainly here at DeLonghi. And we thought it was important for this meeting, typically we don't show interns, but it's important for you to see the sense of space and what this can mean. And so the other key thing in the concept of turning this building sort of inside out was creating this space. We're calling it the Great Hall. It's really that multi-function zone that sits between garage You can imagine these folks standing here to the right of this image by the little HOK logo. That's where you come in from the main ticketing area and you walk into this space. Interestingly, unlike a lot of theaters, what you're seeing here in this wood wall, from what you would normally expect if you go to the opera theater or some places around here. And that's deliberate as we look at how this whole thing works, and it has some loading. But it gave us the opportunity to make this room. It really is that great pre-function. It allows flexibility. There's so many number of things that this can do for centene functions here. You see it set up as a co-broadcast, right? So if there's 1,000 seats full and there's another 300 here. But you can imagine how this could really make for great public performance as well. When you come to a show, you've got to land somewhere. You've got to land. You've got gather yourself. You need a place with lights that flash before you find . So this was one of those great homes. The room itself, as we described, the interior of the audience chamber is really built around flexibility, to Travis's point. We had to design a space that was perfect for this setting. This is a corporate setting. You can see stage curtains down, major projection up, audio. So this is a mic setting in this format. But this also is flexible to accommodate other performances, musical performances, vocal performances. And so a lot of the shape detailing And work that went into this room was built to the flexibility that we can accommodate those 100 events of varying types, as well as anything that Centene could dream on for this particular hall. So this is a view sort of if you're on stage, if you're looking back out, it's always important for people who do a lot of public speaking, This is the view back, and what's interesting about this too is it's very compact. And so it was a lot of work for us to get a very kind of compact hall with 1,000 seats. So if you think about the scale of what that is, this kind of represents how connected performers or speakers would feel to the hall. About 1,000 seats. Yeah, we're at 1,000 right now. And it's flexible, which is interesting, by the way, that the front of this, in fact, where these four ladies in this room are standing, the orchestra pit itself is adjustable, and so it can flex from 700 to 1,000 depending on how we stage that particular piece of equipment. Because it can be in three different positions. It can be on a stage, it can be low, or it can be all the way down for full orchestras. So I talked a little bit about the program and what we did and how it influenced the planning. So I think this is walking through the plans is a great way to show some of that thinking. So I'm going to use my laser here. So this is the creation of the Great Hall, which was really unlocked by rethinking this typical way we would do this. It allowed for a public world to wrap around the whole hall, and then in doing so, we kind of opened up the idea that what we had shown was really a shelf space, I think, in January becomes the entry So it's a very, in a sense, traditional sequence of arrival, check, decompress in the hall, and then you find your way around to those different entry points for the hall, which there are about four different ways to get in. Somebody had asked me where all the bathrooms were. This is Code Plus. and comfort has been layered in, in terms of where those are. So you'll see them stacked there on multiple places. keep going through this. The loading was a comment that Craig brought up. We have right now this consolidated dock, which is in the garage. And this is interesting because it's a story lower. So much like our other plans, when the garage is closed, the gate is down, you don't see vehicles. We've designed this so the trucks, even the big truck, you can see him here, is fully enclosed within the garage. And then this has direct access to stage. So if you think about a major production event from Centene or something that needs equipment, there's direct access to stage, career stage, which again, if you think about how we oriented this building, it's an interesting puzzle piece to get right. These I'm gonna run through quickly and I just say just look at the kind of bright yellow. The bright yellow is, quote, public space. This is places for circulation and movement. And you can see that another giant bank of restrooms here. So this is all the way down into the Carondelet level. This is the entrance here. You'll see that there's a grand stair, and that's that secondary entry point that we mentioned coming off of Carondelet. If you look at it, and we're going uphill, right? So there's a story. This is the next level up, which is really a foresight level. So it's a full story between the two. So the grand stair comes up, and the great hall you could walk into on grade at Forsyth, but it's plus one at Crown of Lab. This, with these ramp sequences I was describing, brings you up to balcony level. And as we work around, and then at the upper balcony, so this is obviously right upwards, there's yet another layer of circulation and breakout space, places for people to gather. So there's these multiple kind of ribbons, which was kind of expressive of why that picture does look like this. And this all fits into the site, I think, rather well. As, again, I keep going back to what Craig said, we've covered everything in this preamble. There are three different sub-districts within this one block. There's 2A, which is the garage, 2B, which is the auditorium, and future 2C. So this kind of delineates that. Again, we come back and show you kind of all of it at this point. One other comment from the Alderman meeting was where the bike racks, they're right there. They're sort of down to that screen wall and just to the west of the new entry. So the bulk that are outside have been located to call out for you. We made a commitment in the overall SDD as well as in the specific SD1 plan. we would be anticipating looking for a public realm on all of these sidewalks that was in excess of the city's standard. So the city's standard represents a 12 foot 4 sidewalk, and obviously we agree with all of staff's comments to small changes to the standard. Here's where we left you guys in January. And we didn't know what the dash line was going to be, but we knew we were going to have city standard blocks. We had shown you on SD1 we wanted to continue that. We anticipated an improved environment in Long Island. And we were hopeful that we would see larger and more open space around the sidewalk as we came around the corner as well. And this is representative of where we are. So I'm going to point out to you that the orange is the city standard, and everything else is in excess. So if you look at, that's the 12 foot 2. And we kept it at the 12 foot 2 to accommodate some of the striping and lay-by that Craig mentioned that we can get an accurate and good within the traffic impact drop-off here for the front door of the Great Hall. There's a drop-off for the secondary entrance as well. But everywhere else is in excess of city standards. It's actually quite a bit more as we come around here. And I'm gonna walk you through some quick drawings of what each of those is. So this is just a continuation of what the SDV said, which is for this to have that activity, for people to be inside and outside, you know, that little bit of extra room. Here you can see it's plus seven in the medium blue, and it ranges from plus two at its point to plus 10 feet of additional buffer here, and then an additional plus two there. So there's quite a bit of additional public realm that's been wrapped around this building. Some vignettes to kind of describe what that is. So this is the view looking down Forsyth at that front door, and I'm going to draw a section here. So this is, I start with the city standard, which is that one little strip, and here's the lay-by we've accommodated, and then the new striping. So this kind of creates that generous drop-off, a healthy canopy for people to come and arrive under. As we move down to the prow of this building, you can see we've actually pulled and angled it in to create additional buffer as much as we could without compromising that secondary layer of interior circulation. So the idea here is that this whole inside-outside feels very open, transparent, and active. But this landscape zone here, so we've got the city standard, the bike lanes, et cetera, this varies from anywhere from 2 to 10 feet of this green buffer that wraps the prow of the building. And as we come down to Trondallet, again, we didn't want that drop-off to impact the city standards. This is maintained in all areas for us. So that entrance is actually parked into the building about an additional seven feet. So the building actually pulls inward if you look at the floor plans, how this would happen. So that creates another covered zone drop-off. So a very... I think robust look at the city sidewalk now to create lots of opportunities for people to walk and be active and sort of be part of this world here. Materiality, I think, is more about Airbnb, but quickly to flash up, it's consistent with the campus, so high level of finishes in terms of favors and look. It's just to give you as the board and as the mayor the notion that we've said that this will have continuity and feel across the full SDV. We're gonna deliver on that. And we're going to deliver the city

streetscape standards will be incorporated.

Yeah, absolutely. I think there were a handful of places where we might have implied some errors in the 12-foot-2 zone. That will be 100% city standard. On the landscape, these are the range of, again, accepted city standard trees. and we would follow suit with that as well. So this is merely not to go into too much detail in the planning, but to illustrate that the consistency that we've talked about has been really important. So just some more views. What is this going to look and feel like? This is a different project, but just give you a sense of that dual layer, the very transparent outside. That's the intent is that the exterior glass is highly transparent to showcase that circulation activity in public space all around this building. In terms of materiality, the auditorium shell itself is this range of warm red terracottas. Masonry is very deliberately tied to the character of the neighborhood. So the feature piece, which is contrasted against the sort of fabric of glass and softer grays, is in tone with sort of the red brick of the area. But it's done with terracotta, which is a slightly longer and a little bit more modern material, but still masonry. It's a pretty simple palette. It's really this kind of beautiful terracotta object, these glass ribbons, and then the granite and precast base that varies depending on grading. And we've got about a story plus of grade to see what this would wrap around so that the height of that would change. And then these are the technical elevations, just to illustrate again. This is looking from Forsyth. And again, I think that I would just show something. A lot of what I talk about about stepping, the character of the mouse is shown in these drawings, and this is what we submitted for ARB approval as well. Fairly simple. And it's the same palette here as we look around. I'll take this opportunity to address one other comment that came up, which is the screen wall. If you have very good eyes, you'll see that note has been changed to be the requested staff comments about the stone-clad screen wall. So I'm just making a point that there was four or five key comments we've addressed even for today. And I think that's essentially it. It's a relatively concise presentation, but any questions or anything that I could answer for folks, I'd be happy to get questions, comments here.

Yeah, I have a question. During the architectural review, you, as the representative of CTEEN, agreed to put retail back into VA, to VA.

Yes, and we have created, we have taken those, the strip of parking along Forsyth. I'm going to show you that plan. So there was a parking that was here, they removed, and we've added shell space for Utah Tennessee Air. That was one of the comments. Yeah, it's... It's right here. I'm sorry it was a little wobbly from afar, but this was previously parking that was facing Forsyth and there was a couple of comments about the request to make that shelf-based retail tendency and we've

done that. The comment was to continue the retail therefore industrial experience.

So this basically there's

no parking now on Forsyth.

So can I ask you a question also about that, because I'm just wanting to try to clear. I have to use these visuals you gave us. I'm looking at this

picture. Yeah, I'm going to pull that one up. It's good about a small presentation. I can do this

fast. So I guess what I'm trying to understand, and that looks a lot brighter, and this looks very dark, but... I see the entrance to the lobby, I guess. It's part of the garage. And then as you go left, I can see a wall and I see a garage in and out. And then what is next?

This is what we changed in plan. These renderings take a little more to update, so what will happen for the plans, this will become that little pocket of retail right here. So it would go main entrance, box office, the parking entry, which was part of the traffic, right? We have to align that at the streetlight. That little retail tenancy space here and then the elevator entry.

So there's basically one storefront right in there?

Well, I would argue there are. Yeah, there's one storefront, but there are essentially three that are... There's three of them. Two of them are for the theater. Okay.

Yeah, because I'm just trying to get a sense of the pedestrian quality here. You're walking along the front. I can't see the rest of it, but if you're walking along the corner of Hamlin and Forsyth, what are you encountering? You know, you have real successful... garage with retail under it and the western block, the four sides. So how will this compare to that? And what is, after that, what is next? Oh, that's Lada. That's

the end of the development. And then there's another garage? And then there's the full SD1, yeah, which is all that. That whole frontage is set up to accommodate retail as well.

Okay, great. I think that's a good question. All right. I have one other question. I wasn't around for the early stages of this so sorry about that, but the actual architecture the style of the garage with the large brick solid walls can you just tell me how that came to be and how you feel it relates to everything else along the course then

sure um well what we've done here there's there's a lot of this very particularly the interior of the building if you look at the auditorium itself there's a lot of the performance. It's really tuned. It's like being inside an instrument. That kind of formal quality, we were interested in tying the idea together, which is why this building is so shaped. It's very engineered. So from a pure visual, there was an intent to bring it all together. But we were mindful that we had broken the scale of it down, that we didn't want to have one thing, and that we'd introduced a lot of glass and sort of opportunities for us to look not quite as, for example, the sort of uniform boy of our other first garage. That was in the STD section. So the panelization is about the breakdown of scale, the introduction of these windows gives some life and character, much like we had on the other garage. But really it was looking at the overall character that we found in the film. There's texture, there's variety in that brick. Again, that came up in the RV. There's a lot of movement going on in it, so we thought that was a very successful one.

Can you talk at all about the other side of this garage and what that's currently planned to be? Sure. The faces of Caragolet and what we're looking at

now? Yeah, absolutely. We brought some of the glass and other material to lobby around. So again, if you imagine that the garage itself is here, but that kind of more open character comes about a third of the way in. This zone garage, actually I don't know if I referenced this, one of their comments in ARB was to add some foliage here at the base. This is a firewall that we have to build for 2C. So we need a full separation between the uses there. So we're limited in what we can do in terms of any openings, because the intent is to have that third development at some point to come talk to you about. But what we have committed to is a similar panelization And I think we committed in the ARB as well that we would be looking at a form line or a face print on these panels to give a certain character entrance. That was one of the things we agreed to in terms of continuing that basic look on this facade. So it's really... By requirement, it is solid. But it certainly has texture and materiality and quite a bit to it for now until we can come back and do the other building. What's the material between the bricks? This is a textured precast concrete. So I have an elevation to share with you. So I only have the elevations here for 2B, because we want to come back to 2A. But the rendering, I think, illustrates it well enough to talk about . So hopefully that

answers your question.

I haven't answered your question yet about the material.

You're saying the white panels are pre-capped? Yes, yeah. And then this is aligned and painted. We're studying right now the lining versus the . So we agreed to building that thing. So the mechanism how we get there is . Go ahead.

So again, I know this is under the bridge, but I just want to understand that people ask me, the choice of brick, black, charcoal gray variation there. How did you get to that with all the red brick and all the other material stone that is around that area, particularly on the left side? Sure,

it's a good question. These are evening shots because it was important, I think, to show the kind of life, particularly the bookended life of evenings. that does have a tone. If you looked at the material sample that we reviewed, it was quite a light gray and a blend. There's a photo of the curriculum I'm able to show. I think it was really important, two things I would say. One, and again, we're not talking as much between history. We do bookend the building with this little step down of the red tones. The red does address Lyle. The contrast, I think that we highlight this, is really important. Architecturally they have some. And I do think that introducing a set of grays in this image actually is better for the street because it's a long street and to have some variation I think it's actually wonderful, personally. So we liked its contrast, we liked that it highlighted the auditorium. We liked that it got a little bit more neutral and that it created a visual variation as you go down the forest. I think it's just all sort of multiple tones

of red. So it kind of breaks up the look because the garage to the west is red. There are various, yeah, series of red tones. To the east you have glass and a wood look. So you're bringing more material in. Correct.

Is it the same palette you showed us? So there's actually a lot of variation within the pattern. It's not going

to be a model type. Anybody else have a question? Yes, sir.

This is Rob. The box office, if you've got the screen on, I'm trying to figure out how much use that box office is going to get. I mean, I saw from the introduction, you talked about moving forward, things that you might be looking at. So my question is really because I'm concerned also about how much retail can you actually have there? I know that it was considered that perhaps a box office would be considered retail, which I don't think it is. I don't see a box office getting used as a store would be in terms of being open for actual business on a regular basis, on a daily basis, which would help with street use, you know, feet on the ground. So my question is, what do you really see in terms of box office use? Think of one of the other earlier, a pretty

decent retail space. I'll point to him. I was going to say Chris Rubishan, project executive from the Bushman-Waite building, history with this type of building.

Christopher Rubishan, a project executive. So we've given a lot of thought to this. And this is not a performing arts center for next year. It's a performing arts center for a very, very long time, 50, 100 years. And we have committed to 100 performances a year, 100 events, whatever they are, be it a soloist to a symphony to a Broadway place that might run for several days. And as we thought through the program, we realized that In all likelihood, in order to make this work, at some point Centene is either going to have to create their own organization or to bring in a marketing organization that can book And this box office is meant both to be open at certain times for key events, like if there's a Broadway show you can come and buy a ticket here. Or to have will call for people that have ordered things online and want to go pick it up during the day or whenever they want to do it. So it's a long-term idea that we feel is really very, very important in order for the functionality of the overall facility.

The introduction indicated 100 events, which included 17 educational, included some other things. Do you want to go back

to the- No, I believe the commitment is for 100 third party events. It is. It is for 100 third-party events. And so if there was confusion there, let me just erase that confusion. All right.

I was just trying to envision the use of the box office as a space for retail.

Like any box office, some of them are active all day, a couple of days, and sometimes there's no activity at all for a couple of days. It's just whatever the event is that's causing the need to be there. But without it, we felt that this facility would be severely impaired.

Well, you have a main entrance and you could have a box office inside. Well, we're going to have security

issues too that we're going to try to deal with. It's more than just a single issue of getting in and whatever. We don't show you the security features in the lobby. You can turn it off and turn them on, but it's in use and not in use. It's very important. We don't want people going in there

unsupervised. The implication of the two questions or the questions that are coming from these two is that the intent has been the pedestrian experience These are the people coming on the metro, and then going to walk up to a retail or restaurant in Clayton. What their experience would be. The experience on the north side of the street is negligible. So the experience on your side of the street, is what we have been trying to enhance. That's the reason for these questions. Well, I guess

you just sort of, give you the concept. Performing arts centers are, for the most part, dead buildings. When you go and look at most performing arts centers, there is no activity around them because they tend to be solid institutional type of facades. What we've tried to do here is to open this up, to create a likeness and visibility and transparency so that when there is activity, you can see it, recognizing that there won't be activity many times in the day. But when you walk by it, you're going to be looking inside all the artwork on the walls, all the things to look at. It's not like you're going to walking by, you know, That's

a very good point that I don't think we've considered, considering it's glass all the way on the bottom. You're saying there will be exhibits or artwork or something in there?

There's going to be programming happening. There's going to art in there. I don't think at this stage anybody can tell you we're going to have this or that. But the fact of the matter, if you look at Centene's facilities, they're filled with art. They're filled with interesting things to look at.

We've had a long conversation about this at ARB, and one of the realizations that came to us is that when Centene is using it as a corporate auditorium, it will still be active because we will be able to see the people going around. So it won't be a retail space, it will be active and move people around the way they built

it. What is the schedule on this? In fact, Chris, why don't you take us back to where we are now, the schedule on handling power and then the schedule on this project.

We're about four months in the construction of the tower with an overall completion deadline of about 26 months. So we have about 22 months, about two years to finish out the tower. The east garage, which is this one right here, will be completed well in advance of that. And the west garage will be completed several months after we complete the tower because of the need for a welcome chair. And we're looking at starting, we can't really start, we couldn't even begin to start the auditorium until the east garage is completed. Because of the construction technique where we're coming in from the west and building it from the west, coming in from the east, and building a precast garage from the west to the east. And so we're staging on that site there. The second thing is that we're just now, we've just finished our schematic design for this, and we estimate that at a minimum there's probably another two years of design work. It's an extraordinarily complex building. And so, and we're, doing a lot of cost analysis to make sure that we're able to deliver a building that has an extremely high quality at a reasonable cost. You know, it would be no sooner than two years start and then it really is a function of centene and finance and all the rest of that kind of stuff. It's, the chairman As indicated that this is a major priority for him. And I think that, I'm sure they've had some conversations with you there and I think the idea is to get it going as quickly as possible. Thank you.

Yes, Mr. Berkowitz.

I just want to say it looks like a fantastic facility. I think a lot of effort and work has gone into it. And I think it will be something that Clayton will be really proud of. So I'm very pleased with what I've seen of it. Appreciate all the work that went into it.

Anybody in the audience have a question or comment about this? Okay, then I will close the public hearing.

I'd like to introduce bill number 6618, an ordinance to consider approving a special development sub-district plan, sub-district 2B, this 18 claim campus development to be read for the first time by town hall.

Any further discussion? Any questions or comments? City Attorney.

Bill number 661A of this meeting, an ordinance approving a sub-district development plan for sub-district 2B of the 17 Clayton Campus Sub-Medical Development District and other actions related thereto.

All in favor? Aye. Any opposed?

I'd like to move that the board gives unanimous consent to consideration for adoption of bill number 6618 as of the day of its introduction.

Second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Let the minister reflect the board has given unanimous consent.

I'd like to introduce bill number 6618. I'm ordained to consider approving a special development sub-district plan, sub-district 2B for the 17 Clayton campus development for the second time by title 1. Second. Any

further questions or

conversation? Bill number 6618, second reading and consideration for adoption. An ordinance approving a sub-district development plan for sub-districts to lead on the Centene-Clayton Campus Special Development District and other actions related thereto. I

would

just like to echo what Alderman Berkowitz said. This is going to be a magnificent addition to our city. We're very happy, very proud of it, and we thank you guys for all the work you've done to bring it to us. Thank you. Thank you very much.