NIA Center supporters pitch new deal to save west end business hub

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Tenants and supporters of the NIA Center made a last-minute push Wednesday to save the Parkland neighborhood business center ahead of a scheduled vote to help finance its sale and eventual demolition.

The West End Opportunity Partnership, a public body that invests taxpayer funds in west end neighborhoods, will consider spending $2.1 million at a special meeting Wednesday evening to help buy the building for an affordable housing development led by Goodwill Industries of Kentucky. The partnership board deadlocked on a similar vote last week.

The deal involves the TARC transit agency selling the property — a move that has upset business owners renting at the NIA Center who would have to find new office space. It has been tweaked to offer tenants there $5,000 in moving expenses.

Instead of the Goodwill plan, opponents want Metro government to consider funding a different sale to a undisclosed nonprofit organization that would keep the building in its current use.

"We would like the community to support us in that," Shaun Spencer, owner of a printing business at the NIA Center, said at a press conference Wednesday morning. "Because that means you get your community room back. We get to bring in more businesses."

Another speaker, Danette Matthews of the West End Community Action Network, called the plan for the NIA Center site a "pattern of using public dollars without public power or insight, and it's a pattern of displacing Black people and businesses and masking it as progress."

Under the proposal that stalled last week, the partnership would lease the site to Goodwill for $1 a year for 99 years. Goodwill and co-developer Woda Cooper Companies would build 76 units of affordable housing on three acres, including for people who have been "impacted by poverty, addiction and the justice system," according to a description of the project.

West End TIF district — The West End tax increment financing (TIF) district in Louisville's western neighborhoods

Goodwill, a nonprofit organization, is developing the adjacent Opportunity Campus and had initially eyed three acres there for the housing project before changing course because of Norton West Louisville Hospital’s interest in expanding on the Goodwill site, partnership attorney Amy Cubbage said last week.

Goodwill initially asked for a $2.5 million grant to help buy the NIA Center, but that request did not "align" with the partnership’s funding model, according to a March 18 internal letter reviewed by WDRB News.

The organization "must prioritize the equitable distribution of Partnership funds to support a range of vital nonprofits in the Parkland neighborhood," Laura Douglas, its president and CEO, told Goodwill in that letter.

"A concentration of this magnitude would restrict opportunities for other essential community initiatives serving the same population," she wrote.

That proposal was then changed, Douglas told WDRB in an interview Wednesday morning. Instead of a grant, Goodwill’s request for $2.1 million now calls for the partnership to own the land.

In addition, Douglas said, the partnership would have oversight during construction and the selection of tenants.

The request failed during a special, virtual-only meeting last Thursday when the board voted 9-9. Board members representing financial and government institutions largely voted in favor, while members representing individual neighborhoods made up most of the opposition.

Created by the Kentucky General Assembly in 2021, the partnership will oversee spending from a tax increment financing (TIF) district in a 12-square-mile area across nine neighborhoods in the west end. For 20 years, a portion of tax money generated there would be diverted from government coffers and invested in projects approved by the board.

The largest project approved to date is a $4.2 million loan to the Housing Partnership Inc. for commercial and warehouse space at its Gateway on Broadway project.

The partnership board meets at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday.

West End TIF board weighs buying NIA Center property on behalf of Goodwill

TARC to sell west Louisville's NIA Center, leaving small businesses and nonprofits in limbo