CITIES TRY DO-IT-YOURSELF DEVELOPMENT
THREE COMMUNITIES IN ST. CHARLES COUNTY - O'FALLON, LAKE ST. LOUIS AND WENTZVILLE - ARE GOING THE EXTRA MILE WITH CORPORATE OFFICE PARKS, `SPEC' BUILDINGS.
By Virginia Baldwin Hick
Of The Post-Dispatch Staff
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
September 29, 1996
Section: BUSINESS
Richard Finholt, manager of the Missouri Research Park overlooking the Missouri River in St. Charles, was among the first to call Highway 40 from Chesterfield to Wentzville a potential "high-tech corridor."
Saying that doesn't make it so, but several communities along the route are working to make the designation a reality. Mike Ranken, of O'Fallon, says he and his fellow economic development directors in the area envision a succession of business and industrial parks along the route, filled with companies engaged in research that results in some kind of production - of goods or information.
In addition to the usual aggressive campaign to get development and new jobs, three communities in St. Charles County are going the extra mile and becoming property developers themselves.
The city of O'Fallon has commitments for most of the 12 lots in its O'Fallon Corporate Center, which is zoned for light industrial and office use.
Lake St. Louis is concentrating on an office-only development, Hawk Ridge Business Park, adjacent to its city-owned golf course by the same name. The first building has been built and sold, and the city is close in negotiations on a couple other sites.
Wentzville has built and sold one "spec" industrial building and is starting to market a second, in hopes of having something to show companies wanting to locate close to the General Motors plant. City planners also are close to buying land to develop an industrial park.
City boosters, builders and tenants alike say they see some advantages in municipally developed property.
Lake St. Louis decided 10 years ago to expand south of Highway 40 and increase its tax base, said Ron Nelson, city administrator. "We were and are a residential community, but we saw this opportunity with the land south of 40 to develop a commercial tax base."
City officials decided, after three feasibility studies, that a golf course would be a good idea too. The city bought 232 acres and developed 180 acres into the golf course and 45 acres for the business park.
"We wanted something to distinguish us from other property in the metro area," Nelson said. "We knew it would draw people."
Also in the back of the minds of Lake St. Louis officials was a proposed interchange on Highway 40 at Lake Saint Louis Boulevard, which will open into Hawk Ridge.
"The interchange project came first," Nelson said. The city bought the Hawk Ridge property in 1993, "when we realized the interchange would become reality."
O'Fallon's Ranken said owning and marketing the ground "allows a more controlled growth."
Builders and prospective tenants know up front what uses the city will accept.
"You won't see salvage yards; you won't see concrete plants," Ranken said. "You will see more precast tilt-up buildings, with lots of green space and nice trees and not as many industrial smokestacks as you would in a typical industrial park."
City ownership and control can work in a builder's favor too. John Laur, who built the first building in Hawk Ridge, said he was wary at first about working with city officials as developers.
"My first reaction was that this isn't going to work," Laur said. "A government entity usually doesn't care about how much it costs the person moving in - they care about what they want.
"So I came in thinking they're not going to think about us."
It didn't take Laur long to change his mind.
"Our first meeting, they were so willing to work with us - more so than private entities," Laur said.
City property development is a way of priming the pump, of encouraging private developers to go and do likewise, said Gene Thompson, economic development director in Wentzville.
Most cities in St. Charles County are fast-growing bedroom communities. Wentzville has the opposite problem - a daytime worksite population of 12,000 and a night-time residential population of 5,500. General Motors provides the core of the worker population, with nearly 3,000 employees, followed by GTE with 1,500, Thompson said.
"It's a nice problem to have more jobs than you have population in your community," Thompson said.
But developers have not beaten a path to the community's door. Housing has been in particularly short supply.
So has additional industrial development.
In the last three years, Wentzville has filled nearly 500,000 square feet of industrial buildings.
"We've occupied every large building in the city limits," Thompson said.
Squiring more potential relocation customers is difficult when you have nothing to show them, he said. Land owners who put up "industrial park" signs on farm land barren of utilities, streets or other infrastructure just don't appeal.
But a nearly completed shell of a building does. The city struck a deal with a land owner and started a 30,000-square-foot building in 1994. "We sold it before we got two sides on it," Thompson said. Lear Seating Co., which makes seats for GM vans, bought the building, which was across the road from GM. Lear expanded it to 42,500 square feet and hired about 125 people.
Wentzville's second building, at Route A and Highway 61, stands ready for a deal.
It's a shell of steel, walls and roof, Thompson said, ready for the purchaser's specific requirements for floor, plumbing, electricity, heating and ventilation.
Having the shell saves about 120 days of construction time, Thompson said. "And we have a building to show."
The city's success as a developer has been catching, Thompson said.
Last year, "we couldn't find five or six homes for sale in Wentzville" at any one time, he said.
Residential builders have evidently gotten the word.
In the first five months of this year, more than 800 home sites were platted by developers, nearly a 10-fold increase over all of last year.
