By David Nicklaus
Boston has Route 128. North Carolina has the Research Triangle. And soon, the Weldon Spring-to-Wentzville stretch of Highway 40 may be recognized as the St. Louis area's premier technology corridor.
The Missouri Research Park anchors the corridor's east end. Across the road, WorldCom Inc. is building a $50 million regional operations center and Enterprise Rent-A-Car is building a data center. Monsanto Co. tentatively plans to put its new Integrated Protein Technologies business on land immediately west of the Missouri Research Park. Farther west is the Winghaven development, site of MasterCard International's $90 million global technology and operations center.
The new development means more than 5,000 people will be working in technology-based jobs in just a four-mile stretch. The MasterCard, WorldCom and Enterprise buildings will add more than 1 million square feet of office space where a few years ago there was only farmland and forests.
"That can only be really, really great news" for the region, said Christopher I. Byrnes, dean of Washington University's engineering school and chairman of the Technology Gateway Alliance. He said the clustering of technology talent in a relatively small area would help the St. Louis area develop "a critical mass of ideas, people and capital."
While the St. Louis area has a large number of technology-based jobs already -- including large existing operations of WorldCom and MasterCard -- they're not clustered in any one location.
The fierce competition to recruit high-tech employees is one reason firms move to a high-tech corridor, Byrnes said. "It's easier to draw an employee to a region where there are visibly and identifiably a lot of opportunities. If one opportunity doesn't work out, the employee knows that there are plenty of others."
"They like to be with people like them," said Richard Ward, president of urban-planning firm Development Strategies Inc. in St. Louis. "People move from one company to the other. Companies contract with each other. It becomes like a fraternity or sorority of people with common interests.”
The importance of planning
Nobody was talking about a technology corridor 11 years ago when Rick Finholt came to town to be executive director of the Missouri Research Park.
The University of Missouri owns the 700-acre research park, formerly the site of an agricultural experiment station. The park officially opened in 1985, but the first tenant, a National Weather Service station, didn't move in until 1990.
When he came in 1989, Finholt recalls, the area wasn't even on the maps of developers or commercial real-estate agents. The terrain was rugged, the Missouri River was a psychological barrier for many companies and Weldon Spring was best known as the home of a contaminated former uranium-processing plant.
Finholt, who is from the Chicago area, had seen a technology corridor develop along Interstate 88 in that city's far western suburbs. He saw the potential for something similar along Highway 40, and says the St. Charles County Economic Development Council was supportive of the idea.
A study by Development Strategies in 1995 outlined the potential for high-tech development between Weldon Spring and Wentzville, and municipal officials cooperated in enacting zoning that encourages office and light industrial use, with plenty of green space between buildings.
"One important underlying strategy was the desire to keep Highway 40 from being developed the way I-70 had been developed, with strip mall after strip mall after strip mall and multifamily housing interspersed here and there. It was clear ... that if that happened, you'd never be able to attract high-tech businesses," Ward said.
Finholt said the careful planning is what's attracting major businesses now. "I do not believe that MasterCard would have selected Winghaven were it not for the fact that it was a planned community," he said.
Golf, greenery draw tenants
The research park itself has grown to 1 million square feet of office and industrial space, with 15 companies and two government agencies employing 1,700 people. It also includes Missouri Bluffs Golf Course, built in 1995 and operated by private investors.
Only a couple of sites, totaling about 20 acres, remain to be leased in the developed part of the park. Another eight-acre site next to the golf course is reserved for a hotel and conference center; Finholt thought he was close to a deal in 1998 but hasn't had much interest from hotel developers since then. The university also could develop an office campus of about 40 wooded acres between the golf course and Highway 40.
Even when fully developed, Finholt said, only about 200 acres of the park would be leased to tenants. The golf course occupies another 200 acres, and the remaining 300 acres would be left as green space.
That's partly because the terrain is rugged, he said, but the green space also makes the park more attractive to high-tech tenants.
"A large part of the intellectual property that's contained within a company is contained within the minds of the employees," Finholt said. "Because they are so dependent on their employees, they like the types of amenities that help them attract good people."
Westar Corp. is the research park's newest tenant, having moved from Bridgeton just this month. Vice President Robert T. Topping said that about half of Westar's employees live in St. Charles County, and that the park's golf course, hiking and biking trails and other amenities were big draws.
Westar writes software, develops and hosts Web sites and makes equipment used for testing flat-panel displays, like those used in laptop computers. Employee turnover in the software industry is more than 10 percent a year, but Topping said his firm prides itself on turnover that's less than half the industry average.
"A move to a facility and a park like this allows us to attract and retain the most competent people in St. Louis," Topping said. He said employees use Missouri Bluffs regularly, even hitting balls at the driving range during their breaks. The company plans to put a basketball court on its parking lot, and a small gym inside its building.
He also likes the park's University of Missouri connection. Westar, he said, recruits graduates from both the Rolla and Columbia campuses, and provides scholarships to between nine and 15 University of Missouri students each semester.
What about regional impact?
The research park and the technology-corridor concept have not been free of controversy. Early in the park's life, St. Charles County officials were upset because buildings in the university-owned complex didn't go on the property-tax rolls. Finholt said that in 1996 the university voluntarily began making all new buildings taxable; the Missouri Legislature then wrote that policy into law. Litigation continues over the tax status of seven companies that got tax exemptions under the old policy.
There also are worries, in private and sometimes in public, from officials in St. Louis and St. Louis County, who don't like to see the region's fastest-growing companies move across the Missouri River.
Finholt says 60 percent of employees in the Missouri Research Park live in St. Charles County. Putting their jobs closer to their homes cuts down on traffic, he argues, and even those who commute across the river generally are going in the opposite direction of rush-hour traffic.
Additionally, he says, every company that has come to the technology corridor is expanding, not just moving. If suitable space in a technology-friendly area was not available, Finholt contends, some of the companies would have left the region entirely.
Ward, of Development Strategies, says the Weldon Spring-to-Wentzville area isn't, and isn't intended to be, the region's only technology corridor. The 1995 research he did for St. Charles County actually grew out of an earlier study recommending that the entire length of Highway 40, from downtown to Wentzville, be promoted as a technology corridor.
The area already has plenty of technology businesses downtown and in places like Clayton, Creve Coeur and Town and Country, he said, along with important technology anchors in the Washington University and St. Louis University medical schools. Development of the Arena site presents a great opportunity to lure more high-tech companies to the city of St. Louis, Ward added.
So far, Ward believes, the development in St. Charles County has been "happily complementary" to the growth of technology companies across the river.
"There certainly is always going to be some movement," he said. "There hasn't been any great sucking sound. ... but that always is a danger and could happen if the city and [St. Louis] County don't play their best cards."
Topping, whose Westar Corp. recently made the move across the Missouri, sees all the construction cranes in the neighborhood as evidence that Westar made the right decision. "This is a really happening area," he said. "It's exciting to be a part of it."
