Fortune magazine gives St. Louis credit for eight companies in the new Fortune 500 list. That’s the same number as last year, which isn’t bad in this era of corporate consolidation. The Regional Chamber and Growth Association, though, wants to boost our number…

The RCGA leadership trip to Atlanta is over, I’ve caught up on sleep and cleaned out my inbox. Now it’s time to pull a few final tidbits of information out of the notebooks and the memory banks.

• While we were listening…

 At the end of each RCGA leadership trip, delegates start discussing where they want to go next. Sometimes there are joking suggestions that Paris might be nice, or perhaps somewhere in the Virgin Islands.

This year, on the flight home, RCGA…

   Public-private partnerships were a major theme during Day 3 of the RCGA  leadership trip to Atlanta. Speakers included Beverly Hall, a much honored educator who has been superintendent of the Atlanta schools since 1999, and Mayor Shirley Franklin.

When she arrived,…

Atlanta, like St. Louis, grew up around railroad lines. And, as in St. Louis, some of those lines are now abandoned or underused as industry has moved out of the center city. And Atlanta has an ambitious, $2.8 billion plan…

We’ve just seen an outstanding example of live-work-play development, or new urbanism or whatever you want to call it. Atlantic Station, a 138-acre development in midtown Atlanta, is less than 10 minutes away from the city center by car. But…

Atlanta has a lot of things going for it — a new $300 million aquarium, an economy that created 69,000 jobs last year, and a wealth of talent coming from its several historically black colleges and universities. But it also…

For the next couple of days I’ll be blogging from Atlanta, where about 85 business and civic leaders from St. Louis are participating in  a fact-finding trip organized by the  Regional Chamber and Growth Association. The RCGA sponsors these trips…