Cerner Corp. has broken ground on an additional corporate campus in southeast Kansas City, Mo., at a location where pioneer history was made, a derelict shopping center once stood and where thousands of new Cerner employees may work in the coming decade.
The 290-acre site, to be called the Trails Campus, so named because the historic westward Santa Fe, California and Oregon trails once traversed the property, was in part the former home of Bannister Mall, one of the region's largest shopping centers, built in the 1980s, but closed in 2007 and razed in 2009.
“Our new Trails Campus is an investment in the hometown Cerner planted roots in 35 years ago and a hub for innovation as we continue to fulfill our mission to improve health and care both globally and here in Kansas City,” said Cerner President Zane Burke. The new campus will afford office space to “more than 16,000 associates the company plans to hire in the next 10 years,” according to Cerner.
In 2013, Cerner acquired 237 acres at the site, about 17 miles from Cerner's corporate headquarters in North Kansas City, Mo.
Plans call for 16 buildings covering 4.7 million square feet to be constructed in the coming decade, of which 4.3 million square feet will be devoted to office space, two data centers, service, training, daycare centers and a company health clinic, the company statement said. The developers also proposed 370,000 square feet of retail space for restaurants, stores and a hotel.
Beginning in 2007, Cerner co-founder and CEO Neal Patterson, and fellow co-founder, board vice chairman and former company president and COO, Cliff Illig, led an investment company that purchased the Bannister Mall site, and a second nearby shopping center, both near the junction of two interstates highway loops, as a possible future home for a new stadium for their major league soccer team, Sporting Kansas City. But the team ended up building the stadium elsewhere.
This will be Cerner's seventh office complex built in the Kansas City area since the company came into existence in 1979, it said.
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