BROKEN ARROW - Walls
and hopes are rising higher at the Bass
Pro Shops Outdoor World construction
site along the Broken Arrow Expressway.
Motorists can now see elevated progress
on the $20 million project, as steel
walls are going up around the 130,000-square-foot
foundation. Bass Pro Shops hopes to
finish construction in October, and
the store could open by mid-November.
"It excites a lot of people,"
City Manager James Twombly said Tuesday.
"When you consider what it looked
like a year - basically wooded hills
- you can see we've come a long way."
In fact, it was 14 months ago that city
officials announced that they had lured
the Springfield, Mo.-based fishing,
hunting and camping-goods giant to build
an Outdoor World in Broken Arrow.
The city offered to pay the $20 million
construction tab and performed about
$3.5 million in water, sewer and utility
improvements.
The Broken Arrow site will be Bass Pro
Shops' second store in Oklahoma. A store
opened in Oklahoma City's Bricktown
area two years ago.
Houston construction firm Gilbane Co.
is building the newest Outdoor World.
The city of Broken Arrow will move in
later to overlay a new road leading
to the store's entrance.
The city's expense initially worried
some observers. Their complaints centered
around the incentives offered to pull
in Bass Pro Shops.
"This 'no cost to Broken Arrow'
deal has us on the hook in excess of
$24 million," Broken Arrow resident
Ralph Grunhof wrote in a March 30 letter
to the Tulsa World.
Twombly predicted that the city will
gain much more than it pays out for
Bass Pro Shops' presence.
Bass Pro Shops planners estimate that
the Broken Arrow store will attract
about 2.4 million retail customers annually,
reports show.
"That's a lot of traffic being
generated," Twombly said. "There's
a lot of other retailers that also will
thrive on that traffic being generated
by Bass Pro Shops."
The sporting goods retailer agreed to
pay Broken Arrow a base figure of $870,000
in rent annually. In addition, Bass
Pro Shops will pay the city 2 percent
of the local Outdoor World's gross revenue
up to $60 million a year.
The company will pay 1 percent for any
revenues over that $60 million figure.
Broken Arrow leaders apparently were
not discouraged by an Associated Press
report that said the Bass Pro Shops
store in Oklahoma City failed to meet
its sales projections by about $5 million
last year.
The Oklahoma City store still generated
$33.5 million in 2004, reports show.
Analysts, however, had projected higher
figures to support incentives offered
by Oklahoma City, the AP reported.
Twombly thinks the Bass Pro Shops Outdoor
World in Broken Arrow could do much
better than the Oklahoma City store.
"It's going to be larger (by about
25,000 square feet), and it's going
to have a restaurant, which the Oklahoma
City store doesn't have," the city
manager said.
The future will take care of itself,
Twombly said.
In the present, just seeing the Outdoor
World's walls going up is a big shot
in the arm.
"Our main concern is just getting
them open," he said.
The city also is planning to build a
$6.5 million hotel and conference center
on a hilltop just east of the Bass Pro
Shops site.
Construction likely won't begin on that
project for another year, allowing time
for a marketing study, Twombly said.
City leaders would then offer the site
to a hotel firm or developer to run.
The developer would repay the city on
a lease deal similar to Bass Pro Shops'
agreement, he added.
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