By David Nicklaus

Of The Post-Dispatch

In case you haven't driven west from the Daniel Boone Bridge recently, here's a flash: St. Charles County is no longer just a bedroom community.

St. Charles County's portion of Highway 40 doesn't have as many shiny office buildings as the stretch between Interstate 270 and Chesterfield, but it's getting there. Last week, Citigroup said it would join the westward rush, building a mortgage headquarters in O'Fallon for up to 5,000 employees.

Citigroup is following the trail blazed by MasterCard International, WorldCom Inc. and Enterprise Rent-a-Car Co., all of which have developed office campuses along a 4-mile stretch of Highway 40.

Call it sprawl if you want, but many people in St. Charles County beg to differ. From their perspective, the new office buildings reduce the number of people crossing the Missouri River to get to jobs in St. Louis County.

Richard Ward, senior principal at Development Strategies Inc., led a study in 1995 that laid out a blueprint for attracting high-tech companies to the corridor between Weldon Spring and Wentzville.

The key was restrictive zoning that preserved land near the highway for campus-style office development, he said. Strip malls would have to be built on connecting roads, not right next to the highway. Warehouses and heavy industry would have to go elsewhere.

Building a sprawling campus is a corporate-lifestyle choice, Ward said. Cheap land is part of the attraction, but so is being able to look out the window at green space.

Rick Finholt has been executive director of the Missouri Research Park since 1989. When he started, he said, many companies wouldn't consider a location in St. Charles County. But after MasterCard and WorldCom announced that they were crossing the river, interest among smaller companies increased.

With public infrastructure -- such as new interchanges -- and private infrastructure -- such as nearby restaurants -- springing up to serve the big companies, prospective tenants no longer feel as if they're moving to the frontier, Finholt said.

But about 40 miles to the east, St. Charles County's success still sets off alarm bells. Why are companies and taxpayers investing money there instead of in downtown St. Louis?

That's a silly question to ask, Ward said. "Everybody's not going to be downtown. There's got to be choice and differentiation," he said.

He noted that with Citigroup, keeping the jobs in St. Louis County wasn't an option, nor was moving them downtown. The company's choice was between O'Fallon and Farmington Hills, Mich., a Detroit suburb made up of -- what else? -- sprawling office campuses.

As of November, St. Charles County had 100,169 jobs, up from 84,685 five years earlier. That's a growth rate of 3.4 percent a year, compared with 0.7 percent for the metro area over the same period.

The suburbs in Illinois also are growing more rapidly than the area as a whole, so the statistics might lead you to think that St. Louis is fighting a losing battle on two fronts. But Ward has another perspective: "I see it as recentralizing downtown."

In essence, downtown needs to do what O'Fallon has done: Look for a way to attract and to accommodate growing companies. "We have to work downtown right now to define and market some sites for new construction," Ward said. "Everybody has focused exclusively on historic preservation."

Metropolitan Square was the last major office tower built downtown. It opened in 1989, just before the recession of 1990-91, so it was slow to fill up.

"A lot of people overreacted to that and said never again," Ward said. "Therefore, as companies grow and expand and need more space, they're moving to Clayton, or they're moving to St. Charles because they can't grow downtown."