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Lux Living, which proposes building a 250-unit, seven-story apartment building on the Missouri Riverfront, is seeking a property tax break worth nearly $7 million from Port KC.

At Port KC’s development committee meeting on Monday, most of the conversation centered on the developer’s track record in ӣ����Ƶ. The company has been subject to intense scrutiny from local media outlets.

In April, the ӣ����Ƶ reported on complaints from Lux Living tenants who moved into expensive new apartments to find they weren’t yet completed. Tenant complaints date back to at least 2016 when the Riverfront Times documented problems with cockroaches, maintenance issues and bait-and-switch practices from the company, which at the time was called Asprient.

Since then, as the company has grown, it’s butted heads with construction labor unions for hiring non-union contractors and filed lawsuits against a competitor and the city. Lux Living also led ӣ����Ƶ to create new incentive claw-backs after the developer made millions selling two apartment buildings to investors quickly after securing 20-year tax breaks from the city.

Port KC officials downplayed the press coverage on Monday.

“If you’ve been around multi-family business long enough or frankly if you’ve ever lived in an apartment building, you know that tenant complaints are not all that uncommon,” said Brian Rabineau, an attorney at the port. “There’s always going to be an issue that someone for some reason is upset about.”

But he said the organization took the complaints seriously enough to bolster contract language. The development agreement will allow the port authority to intervene in the new apartment building if the company racks up property code violations or excessive vacancies, for example.

Krishan Purvis, senior development manager, said he and Port CEO Jon Stephens visited four Lux Living buildings in ӣ����Ƶ last week. They visited with property managers, spoke with residents and visited with a general contractor at an active worksite, he said.

Purvis said the buildings they visited are near full capacity. He said conversations with tenants were mostly positive and that he found the properties to be clean and in good condition.

Lux Living officials did acknowledge past mistakes with allowing residents to move in too early, he said. But they promised they were “working on an approach to professionalize their operations at every level,” Purvis said.

“We didn’t have any evidence to substantiate the claims that were made in those articles about poor maintenance, trash, security, broken elevators, pests — things like that that are very serious — we did not see any of that actually on site.”

Before Monday’s meeting, that the developer failed to disclose previous SEC violations to the port authority. The incentive application asks whether the firm’s partners have been charged by a regulatory agency for violating financial or professional regulations.

Lux Living answered no, though CEO Victor Alston was sanctioned by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2017 while running a separate company in California, NPR reported. The federal agency found Alston broke accounting rules, fined him $100,000 and banned him from serving as an officer of any public company for five years.

Rabineau said some developers might have disclosed such an issue, but said Alston was not technically required to because he wasn’t “formally charged with a violation.” Alston voluntarily surrendered his license and paid a penalty in lieu of facing charges but never admitted to wrongdoing.

Still, Rabineau said the news story has pushed the port to refine its application questions so that the agency would be aware of such issues.

“If this project were coming forward today, that is something that would have been disclosed or required to be disclosed,” he said, “but at the time was not.”

Alston could not be reached for comment on Monday.

Kansas City Public Schools, Kansas City Public Library and the Community Mental Health Fund all raised concerns about the tax break proposed by Lux Living.

Bruce Eddy, executive director of the Community Mental Health Fund, said he wasn’t opposed to the project, which includes 50 units that meet city guidelines for affordability.

“But I also need to tell you that I’ve withheld any kind of opinion based on all the concerns that were brought to light in this process and Port’s kind of lack of attention to those in the application process,” Eddy said. “I do have to say I appreciate the post hoc work, but that was based on a bunch of bad press. So it’s really a concern that I have based on the developer and the process.”

Those concerns weren’t persuasive to committee members, though. The body voted 5-1 to approve the project, moving it to the full Port KC board for consideration.

Lux Living is also redeveloping the Katz Drugstore building in Midtown Kansas City. Last summer, the Kansas City Council voted 9-4 to award a 10-year tax abatement to aid that project, which will build 192 market rate units.

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