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Cities look to flood plains for jobs, growth, tax dollars By CHRISTOPHER CAREY Post-Dispatch 07/28/2003
Earth City boomed in the 1980s, becoming one of the first major commercial developments in the flood plain in the Missouri part of the metropolitan area.
(Teak Phillips/P-D)
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The Bridgeton City Council faced a stark choice: endorse plans for a 417-acre business park in the Missouri River bottoms or preserve one of the community's biggest areas of open land as flood plain.
At a meeting last year to consider the proposal, Councilwoman Barbara Abram offered a blunt assessment of Bridgeton's past and its neighbors' future:
"Bridgeton in the past has hugged a lot of trees, and we've lost out on a lot of development. We're going to be surrounded by businesses while we're looking at flood plain."
Indeed, Bridgeton's largely undisturbed stretch of the river bottoms is bookended by the Riverport, Earth City and Corporate Woods business parks to the south and the new Mills Corp. outlet mall to the north.
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The council voted 7-1 to rezone the land for a business park, despite concerns from some residents that the development would be risky and would produce limited economic benefit.
All along the Missouri River, other cities are doing the same.
The remarkable rebirth of the Chesterfield Valley after the Flood of 1993 has prompted Maryland Heights, Hazelwood, St. Charles and St. Peters to embrace flood plain development projects in a bid for jobs, growth and tax dollars.
New roads, such as Highway 370 and the Page Avenue extension, have been additional catalysts for commercial development in the flood plain. So has the scarcity of flat land elsewhere in west St. Louis County and St. Charles County.
Development projects under way or on the drawing board could turn 14,000 acres of local flood plain into business parks, retail centers, subdivisions and other developments.
That is three times the amount of land that has been developed in the Chesterfield Valley and nearly 10 times the combined acreage that has been developed in Riverport and Earth City.
The building boom also has been aided by an economic development tool known as tax increment financing, which has helped pay for levees, earth work, interchanges and other infrastructure.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, local governments and levee districts are spending more than $200 million to help develop the flood plains in St. Louis and St. Charles counties and help protect the businesses that locate there.
Critics say the practice diverts public money to speculative projects on land once deemed marginal for development. They add that it encourages urban sprawl and works against urban renewal.
Plenty of opportunities remain inside Interstate 270, in St. Louis and the municipalities of St. Louis County, said Don C. Musick III, president of DCM Management Co. and a construction business that bears his name.
"There is land available that can be bought and developed," said Musick, who is putting up a high-rise retail and office building at the southwest corner of Hanley Road and Highway 40 in Brentwood.
The pace of development alarms the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance, which is pushing for a 55,000-acre wildlife refuge stretching across the northern reaches of St. Charles County.
The organization argues that putting billions of dollars worth of buildings on land that has flooded repeatedly is foolish, both environmentally and fiscally.
"It's called flood plain. It's not development plain," said Adolphus Busch IV, a member of the Busch brewing family who lives on a farm in St. Charles County and is the group's chairman.
St. Peters has invested nearly two decades of work in plans for a mixed-use development on 1,640 acres of flood plain along Highway 370, near its intersection with Interstate 70.
St. Peters Mayor Tom Brown said he thinks the conservationists trying to block commercial and residential construction there have misguided priorities.
"My concern is people," Brown said. "Their concern is duck hunting."
The development, dubbed Lakeside Business Park, will promote conservation in a different way, he said, by eliminating thousands of work commutes each week between St. Charles County and St. Louis County.
"We're going to build jobs, we're going to build lives, we're going to build a future," he said. "And we're going to build a city."
The communities trying to duplicate Chesterfield's success are pushing ahead with their projects despite a weak economy and a surplus of office and warehouse space throughout the region.
The efforts have pitted city against city, developer against environmentalist and, in some cases, private-property rights against the public good.
Developers, business owners and their allies in local government dismiss concerns that the levees will fail, barring a flood of biblical proportions.
They argue that the economic benefits far outweigh the risks and represent a substantial return on the public's investment in the projects.
TriStar Business Communities is developing Park 370, the project in Hazelwood that includes the Mills outlet mall.
Larry Chapman, TriStar's senior vice president, got his start in the business with Linclay Corp., the company that created Earth City. That collection of office buildings, warehouse and industrial buildings, hotels and retail businesses was protected by a 500-year levee that held back the Missouri River in 1993.
Critics worry about the cumulative effect of the new levees in Chesterfield, Maryland Heights and St. Peters, and warn that companies that put buildings, inventory and people in the new developments could be operating with a false sense of security.
Chapman, whose current company also is developing property in Earth City and Riverport, says he would not be investing in those areas if he thought they faced inordinate risks.
"You've actually got better levee systems in place there than almost anywhere in the country," he said.
Reporter Christopher Carey:
E-mail: ccarey@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8291
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