The company that holds the debt on about 400 parcels within developer Paul McKee’s NorthSide Regeneration site bid $3.2 million Tuesday for 46 of the properties.
Titan Fish Two LLC easily outbid the city’s Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority, which offered individual bids totaling about $480,000 for most of the 46 properties.
Joseph Campbell, principal of the Shawnee, Kan., company, entered the bids for Titan Fish Two. The transaction at the Civil Courts building resulted from Titan Fish Two’s foreclosure on the NorthSide properties.
Under the foreclosure process, the lender itself can submit a bid for the property, though no money is exchanged if the lender is the highest bidder.
Campbell declined to comment after the sale. The parcels sold at foreclosure are within a proposed footprint of the new western headquarters of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
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McKee was not present at the sale. His spokesman, Jim Gradl, said in a statement later that the sale “will not adversely affect the NorthSide Regeneration project and our continuing plans and efforts for this community.â€
“The sales do not affect efforts to retain the NGA, and we will continue to support the city’s efforts as well,†Gradl said.
Campbell has said he supports the city’s effort to get the NGA to relocate to NorthSide.
Keeping the NGA in the city is major goal of Mayor Francis Slay. Spokeswoman Maggie Crane said the city will continue efforts to assemble property for the NGA on acreage north of the former site of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex.
“Regardless of who owns the property, our goal is to keep the NGA in the city of St. Louis, along with its 3,100 jobs and $1.6 billion investment,†she said.
When Titan Fish announced the foreclosure action weeks ago, one of McKee’s lawyers said in a statement that the parcels facing foreclosure represented about 5 percent of the NGA project area. The land “will ultimately†be sold to the city, the statement said.
Titan Fish initially announced foreclosure of 47 NorthSide parcels, many of them vacant lots. A discrepancy in the foreclosure notice prompted the company’s lawyer to withhold one of the properties from sale Tuesday.
The NGA plans to leave its current site south of downtown. In addition to NorthSide, sites under consideration are in the Mehlville area, Fenton and near Scott Air Force Base in St. Clair County. Final site selection is scheduled for next year.
Michael Allen, a building preservationist who years ago documented McKee’s purchases of north St. Louis properties, attended the foreclosure Tuesday. He said afterward he believes Campbell intends to continue nibbling away at NorthSide in an effort to get NorthSide and McKee to pay more of their debt to Titan Fish.
The company has alleged in suits that NorthSide Regeneration and McKee are in default on 2007 loans totaling more than $17 million tied to the north St. Louis redevelopment project.
Campbell, Allen said, “wants to get paid for the debt and get paid for the ±ô²¹²Ô»å.â€