WAEDC, WIDC and such

Last week, out of curiosity, I followed a link from the City of Warrensburg website to the Warrensburg Area Economic Development Corporation (WAEDC) website. Other than finding much of the site badly out-of-date, I noted that it had a list of available commercial/industrial buildings & sites in Johnson County. On this list was a 40,000 SF shell building in the Warrensburg Industrial Park, owned by another entity called Warrensburg Industrial Development Corporation (WIDC). It had been built "on spec" in 1999 and was still sitting vacant as 2005 ends.

Imagine my surprise when, the very next day, I heard an announcement on KOKO Radio that the building had been sold to Kitco, Inc., a fiberglas fabricator now located in Odessa. We should all be happy that an area entrepreneurial company wants to move to Warrensburg; at the same time, we should wonder why we have this alphabet soup of development agencies, where they get their money to put up a "spec" building, and what (if any) "tax incentives" were involved. I guess more research is in order.

In Liberty