Missouri Association of Counties buys Capitol Avenue property
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (KMIZ)
The Missouri Association of Counties bought the old funeral home at 429 Capitol Ave. in Jefferson City that has been standing since the 1800s.
MAC paid nearly $100,000 for the property and will use it as its headquarters. The group has been looking to be back on Capitol Avenue after its previous building was destroyed by the 2019 tornado, Executive Director Steve Hobbs said.
Hobbs said the group is fortunate to buy the building, thanks to Jefferson City's redevelopment project of the street and to restore it to its original beauty.
"It's our plan to restore this to its once grandeur," Hobbs said. "We're going to have to tear down a couple buildings on the back.
"The original 1868 building, We plan on restoring. There's still some furnishings left inside it. We plan on repurposing as many of those as possible. Make it look like it did in 1940."
The city demolished a building at 401 E. Capitol Ave. on Thursday. A number of abandoned buildings in the area had been declared unsafe. Conditions of two buildings last year – that were seen during a viewing ahead of requests for proposals – were unsafe.
"We took these properties through an eminent domain process over the course of the last nine years," city spokeswoman Molly Bryan said. "And then it has been phased out through an RFP process to get those properties into the hands of developers."
Jefferson City Property and Housing Manager Dave Helmick said that all 36 properties from the previous owner have been inspected and many were declared dangerous, but the city was still able to get a proposal.
The City Council sold four properties in the area in December.
"We had to go through a demolitions based off the engineering reports and, you know, the findings that we had. but as far as the structures that we currently have that have gone all the way through our RFP process, with the exception of two, we've actually been able to get at least some kind of proposal on all of them," Jefferson City Property and Housing Manager Dave Helmick said.
