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							 Sunday, September 14, 2008

                                    Sunday, September 14, 2008

On Monday, a new phase begins with first tenant
Vision takes shape at Aksarben Village
By Christine Laue
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

The first tenants of Aksarben Village will show up to work at their new digs Monday, marking a
monumental juncture for the multimillion-dollar mixed-use project years in the making. Employees at
the Omaha office of the University of Nebraska Foundation are moving this weekend from 87th Street
and West Dodge Road to the former Ak-Sar-Ben horse track property. The newly constructed building
at 67th Street and West Center Road is the first to open in the planned urban community, and in about
another month the first retail tenant — Wohlner’s Grocery — will move into the first-floor space below
the foundation offices. Newly constructed streets that link the project to the surrounding academic,
residential and retail communities opened late last week, with stoplights blinking red, green and yellow
for the first time. Jay Noddle, president of Noddle Cos., which developed the first buildings to open,
could hardly contain his enthusiasm upon seeing a bed of green — a sign that the longtime
construction site had progressed from dirt to finishing touches in some parts. “We got grass!” he ex-
claimed. “We all connect right here,” he said, standing on one of the sidewalks of the pedestrian -
friendly village. “You have everything coming together here.” Stores. Restaurants. Entertainment.
Apartments. Offices. Hotel rooms. Academia.

Aksarben Village is a $250 million to $300 million development that combines it all on 70 acres once
home to an elite horse racing track that closed in 1995. In the controversy of 1996 over what to do with
the property, Ak-Sar-Ben Future Trust was created as the nonprofit owner. Ken Stinson, chairman of
Peter Kiewit Sons’ Inc. and chairman of the trust from its beginning, recalls watching a slide show of
other cities’ mixed-use projects presented by Doug Bisson, a community planner with HDR who was
the neighborhood representative on the trust’s board. “I think he inspired us at that meeting,” Stinson
said would say Doug deserves a lot of credit for planting the seed of this particular idea.” Stinson said
that while Aksarben Village is similar to mixed-use projects in other cities, Omaha’s collaborative effort
— a private developer, universities, a nonprofit owner — is unique. That makes the opening of roads
and the first building even more satisfying, he said. “It’s pretty darn exciting to see that it’s come to
pass,” Stinson said. “The other important point here: This is just the early stages of development.
There’s more to come. It’s very exciting today, and it’s going to get even more and more exciting as
time goes by.”

Dana Bradford of the McCarthy Group, which is helping coordinate the five-developer project, also
viewed the opening of roads and the first building as monumental. “What you’re seeing today is just
the beginning for Aksarben,” Bradford said. For 15 months, as many as 600 people have been
working on the site’s streets, infrastructure and buildings that eventually will accommodate thousands
of people in a bustling urban village, said Noddle. Late last week, hard-hat-wearing workers scrubbed
dirt from door frames, assembled office furniture and carried potted plants from trucks into the 65,000-
square-foot, two-story building at the northeast corner of 67th Street and West Center Road. “We will
be open for business 8 a.m. Monday morning,” said Joe Selig, senior vice president of the NU
Foundation, which occupies the building’s top floor. “We’re just happy to be a part of that new
development in Omaha. We think it’s going to be an exciting place to be.” With the move, the
foundation gains 6,000 square feet of space. The fundraising office was “bursting at the seams” three
years ago when it started looking for additional space, Selig said. “It gets us under one roof; it gets us
some additional conference space, which we badly needed; and it gives some space for additional
growth,” Selig said. The office’s explosive growth — from two full-time employees in 1985 to eight in
1995 and 29 today — is reflective of the growing academic presence in and around Aksarben Village.
The University of Nebraska at Omaha broke ground in June for a new, $31 million College of Business
Administration building on its south campus, which sits north of the private development. The building,
scheduled to open in August 2010, will accommodate a projected 10 to 15 percent enrollment growth
in the business college in coming years, officials have said.
Also to the north is the Kiewit Institute, a University of Nebraska- Lincoln and UNO partnership that
educates engineering and information technology students. The Scott Technology Center, just a quar-
ter- mile from the Kiewit Institute campus, also fuels what Noddle calls “our portal to the knowledge
economy.” And to fuel the hungry students, shoppers, office workers and others at Aksarben Village,
Wohlner’s Grocery will operate out of a 17,000-square-foot space below the foundation offices.
Wohlner’s owner Mike Schwartz said he plans to open the store Oct. 14, closing his longtime store at
5205 Leavenworth St. a day or two before that. “I wish there was more people with me, but I’m real
excited to get started on the new project,” Schwartz said. Other retailers are on the way, but Noddle
declined to name them, saying he wanted to let them announce their own news. While Wohlner’s and
the foundation are the two major tenants in the first building, there are four additional unannounced
tenants in that building, Noddle said. “Let’s just say there’s a store, a restaurant and a bar.”
That leaves 12,000 square feet — a retail space on the first floor and office space on the second floor
available in the first building, he said.

Another Noddle building, just east of the Wohlner’s and foundation building, will open in November, he
said. Two major tenants will occupy space in the two-story building — Grubb & Ellis/Pacific Realty on
the second floor and Security National Bank on the first floor. Two other tenants have signed leases in
that building, and an additional 10,000 square feet remains available, Noddle said. A third Noddle
building is to open in February. Located north of the Wohlner’s and foundation building, at the
southeast corner of 67th and Frances Streets, the 110,000-square-foot building will have retail space
on the first floor and offices on the second and third floors. The fourth floor, which has soaring 26-foot-
high ceilings in places, is apartments on the south end and offices on the north end. Half of the first-
floor retail is leased — to Paradise Bakery, Juice Stop and Godfather’s Pizza. On the first floor, 14,000
square feet remains available. Olsson Associates engineering firm and Noddle Cos. will occupy all the
office space on the second floor. LinkedIn, an online professional networking company, had planned to
take the entire third floor office space. But Noddle said LinkedIn officials about six weeks ago decided
to look elsewhere. “We’re in negotiations for two other tenants for that space,” Noddle said. Noddle
had planned five apartments on the fourth floor but ended up custom-constructing them as two units —
one 6,000 square feet and the other 4,500 square feet — when two customers committed to the space
before construction started, he said. He’s convinced he could have built another dozen or more
apartments. “I think people want to live in an environment like this,” Noddle said. “They like the idea of
a convenient neighborhood and the cachet of a place like this.”

Construction will start in the spring on Noddle’s fourth and final building in this phase, a 40,000-square-
foot building on Frances Street between 64th and 67th. Omaha-based DLR Group, architecture,
engineering, planning and interior design firm, will occupy all but 6,000 square feet, he said. The
remainder remains available. Aksarben Village also will see the opening of one apartment building by
the end of the year. A hotel expected to open in January will kick off the project’s 2009 openings,
followed by a 10-screen movie complex and upscale fitness center. Developers of those projects and
others dealt with construction delays — some up to two months — caused by harsh winter weather
and an unusually rainy spring and summer. But even this past rainy week didn’t dampen the
enthusiasm of the developers as they saw Aksarben Village open its streets. “We like the
progressiveness of the Aksarben development,” said Tom Deutsch, executive vice president of RHW
Management, an Overland Park, Kan., based owner/management company that plans to open the
Courtyard by Marriott at Aksarben Village in late January. “It was a very thought-out development. . . .
We’re thrilled to see the Aksarben Village open.”