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Centene is moving its HQ downtown into Ballpark Village!

From STLToday.com:

Clayton’s loss is downtown St. Louis’ gain. Centene Corp., said today it is moving its headquarters from Clayton to Ballpark Village.

In return for the promise of 1,200 new jobs to downtown within the next five years, Centene will receive $78 million in tax incentives from the city for the approximately $250 million development with more to come from state and federal programs.

Construction is scheduled to begin on the Centene Centre complex in summer of 2008.

The complex will be built in two phases and include office, retail and parking on two blocks at the corner of Broadway and Walnut Street.

Both blocks will see some development as part of phase one. The first block will have 700,000 square feet of office space. There will also be two floors of retail but no square footage was given.

The health care services company will occupy 400,000 square feet and lease out the remaining 300,000 square feet until it needs the space.

The second block will have 1,750 parking spaces and two more floors of retail. The square footage of retail on the second block, or the total number of stories in each buildings was also not released. The rest of the second block will be built in phase two and include up to 550,000 square feet of office space on an as-needed basis.

The retail will be sold back to Cordish at cost and count toward the company’s commitment to 360,000 square feet of retail in the first phase of Ballpark Village.

Cordish will also build a 180-room hotel in the first phase of Ballpark Village. The hotel will accommodate Centene employees, clients and other guests. The location of the hotel was not immediately clear.

“Centene will be the largest employer to move its corporate headquarters into the city in decades – maybe as long as 50 years,” said Mayor Francis Slay in a statement.

The move will help keep a major corporate headquarters within the metro area, bring jobs into the city and increase the momentum of downtown revitalization, Slay said.

To encourage Centene to make the move, the city will give the company $48 million in city tax abatement in addition to other incentives for a total of $78 million in incentives.

Centene will also receive $24 million through a federal incentive program for underdeveloped business districts. The company will receive $1.9 million as a portion of the sales tax collected from the hotel through the formation of a special tax district.

The city also plans to request more funds from the state’s downtown economic program.

These tax breaks will be in addition to the approximately $116 million in incentives already allocated to Baltimore-based Cordish Co., the developers of Ballpark Village.