From the Roundtable: MiTek departs, empty building roster goes up another notch

Doesn’t there seem to be an abundance of vacant commercial buildings for sale or rent around Columbia these days?

Based on my own “drive-by” survey (to borrow a term appraisers employ as they cruise around and spot check properties) the number of “available” properties seems inordinately high and apparently growing. The abundance includes factory and warehouse opportunities, along with a surfeit of retail leaseholds.

A new listing is the former MiTek Inc. premises at 1391 Boone Industrial Drive, a 85,000-square-foot building that can now be yours for a cool $2.7 million. The stealth-like departure of this employer of 35 people to the tax-friendly climes of St. Charles County was arranged this summer but only recently reported. The move comes from the desire to consolidate operations under one roof, legitimately aided and abetted by a $634,000 property tax abatement from St. Charles County.

Although the city must deal with the loss of taxes levied on machinery and the other contents of the now vacant building, the real crusher is the loss of 35 jobs and the payroll. Fewer than a third of MiTek’s workforce here opted to relocate, and some of the others presumably were heaped upon the growing roll of the unemployed, a statistic poised to reach a historically high 7 percent in Boone County.

There has been considerable hand wringing after the fact. But there’s little — tax abatements or not — that any of us could have done to keep MiTek under roof here. This was a subsidiary to the main operation, and our hold was tenuous at best.

It’s time to move on and figure out what to do with all these vacant buildings and leaseholds. Rumblings are heard in the halls of high finance, forebodings spoken sotto voce, about the impending collapse of the commercial real estate market. The tsunami is expected to hit the “coasts” first — East and West. Here in the Midlands we’re less leveraged and not so outrageously overbuilt, but we’ll still catch some of the rising tide.

It’s a matter of occupying people, or finding something for them to do so they can re-occupy these vacant spaces, which range from modest storefronts downtown to the growing inventory of available warehouses and factory buildings.

How do we re-occupy the unemployed? MiTek’s workers turned sheets of steel into connecting plates for roof trusses. Manufacturing is generally in decline as we make fewer and fewer products in this country, it seems almost pointless to get into the tax abatement war to entice some other community’s manufacturing enterprise to relocate and occupy one of our vacant buildings.

I have nothing against someone wanting to open up another bar, restaurant, clothing store or whatever. Good for them.

What concerns me is how all the larger buildings will be re-occupied. For starters, how will we fill the big-box space formerly occupied by Circuit City?