A national retailer is interested in moving into the old Kmart building on Highway 45 North, Golden Triangle Development LINK CEO Joe Max Higgins told the city council Tuesday.
The council voted 5-1 in executive session to enter a regional redevelopment agreement with Lowndes County that would provide tax incentives for the retailer to renovate and operate from the 110,000 square-foot building.
Higgins, along with a consultant for the retailer, met with the council for about 40 minutes in closed session Tuesday. The board of supervisors will consider the county’s end of the agreement at its Sept. 30 meeting.
Instead of naming the retailer Tuesday, The LINK is dubbing it Project Buffalo until all agreements are signed. He expects to announce the retailer’s identity Oct. 1.
“We’ve vetted them. We know them,” Higgins told The Dispatch after the meeting, though he didn’t reveal the type of products the retailer sells. “They’ve got about 130 stores nationwide – in the Midwest and moving to the Southeast. As best I can tell … I think this will be their first Mississippi store.”
If everything moves forward, Higgins said, renovations will take most of next year before the store opens.
Higgins said the store would employ about 60 workers at wages in the $13-to-$15 per hour range.
“That’s what retail pays,” he said. “But (it will offer) health care, benefits, 401(k), that kind of stuff.”
The incentive package would be “performance-based,” similar to the city/county incentives from the Georgia-based Hull Group’s efforts to renovate the former Leigh Mall, both Higgins and City Attorney Jeff Turnage told The Dispatch. The company would earn up to a certain cap of incentives over time – Higgins said probably 10 years in this case – which would be paid through portions of both sales and ad valorem (property) taxes collected from the site.
Hull asked for 15 years to collect $3.125 million in incentives to offset the costs of flipping the old mall “inside-out.”
“It’s the same mechanics of how Leigh Mall works but this is a much more reputable company, so it will happen a lot quicker and easier,” Higgins said.
Kmart closed in November 2018 and the building, in the same shopping center as Bargain Hunt, has been vacant ever since.
“This is great news for the city,” Mayor Keith Gaskin told The Dispatch. “The building has been vacant for several years, and the (interested) retailer sounds promising from what we know about it so far.”
Vice Mayor Joseph Mickens, who represents Ward 2, voted against the incentive deal, but he told The Dispatch he did not oppose the project. Though not entirely clear with his point, Mickens implied the LINK, which contracts with both the city and the county for economic development, did not work often enough to bring things to Columbus.
“You’ll see a coach sometimes in a basketball game and a player did something and he says he didn’t get the call, and (the coach) gets to arguing with the ref, and the ref gives him a (technical foul). The reason he got the tech was for the next call,” Mickens said of Higgins. “… All I’m saying is he needs to work with us. That’s all I’m saying.”
Higgins declined to respond to Mickens’ comment, other than saying the vice mayor had the right to vote how he chooses.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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