As Michael Rankin sees it from his office in O’Fallon, Mo., a St. Louis suburb, the building boom along U.S. Highway 40 is progress and growth.
“It’s one of the greatest things that can help this region,” says Rankin, O’Fallon’s economic development director.
“It will help us retain businesses and corporations and help us bring in new ones . . . It’s another avenue to help keep our region alive and prosperous,” he says.
But to others, including Tim P. Fischesser, executive director of the St. Louis County Municipal League, what Rankin calls progress and growth sends up a red flag. A flag with the “sprawl” word written all over it.
To Rankin, the stores and offices and hotels going up along Highway 40 are the latest symptoms of St. Louisans’ continuing movement from the city to the suburbs, and from close-in suburbs to more distant ones.
Critics say that movement is gobbling up forests and farmland, draining even more life from the city, increasing pollution and taxes and in the end may be more costly and damaging than anyone now realizes.
“We’re building new rooms onto the back of the house while letting the front ones fall apart,” Fischesser argues.
Adds John Marx, the mayor of suburban Town & Country, who has been opposing some development planned near there: “I moved here from the Ft. Worth/Dallas area, and in Dallas, urban sprawl has consumed such a large area that you don’t even find suburban areas like Town & Country anymore with trees, and wildlife and green space.”
Whether you see it as sprawl or progress or perhaps something in between, what’s coming along Highway 40 from just east of Mason Road westward to O’Fallon will dramatically change what you see when you drive the stretch.
Consider, for example, the scope of 11 major projects that developers have on their drawing boards. The totals don’t include some projects where developers have not yet calculated all the costs.
Here’s what is known:
– Total cost: More than $650 million, enough to build two huge sports centers like St. Louis’s Trans World Dome, with money left over.
– Office space: About 2 million square feet, the equivalent of two buildings the size of downtown St. Louis’s 42-story One Metropolitan Square.
– Open or wooded land to be built on: More than 1,400 acres, an area bigger than the city’s 1,293-acre Forest Park.
– Hotels: Five.
– Parking for just six of the projects: Nearly 10,000 spaces, about 6,300 of those on surface lots. The surface parking alone is more than double the 2,700 surface parking spaces at the Galleria shopping mall in St. Louis.
What’s particularly difficult to calculate is the cost of the infrastructure needed to support all the new development. That includes roads and highways, sewers, utilities, flood control, water treatment plants and the like, the cost of which is sometimes paid by developers, sometimes by taxpayers and sometimes by both.
Further complicating the financial picture are costs that spill over into neighboring communities, which may have to deal with traffic congestion or storm water rolling off all the asphalt and concrete.
A conservative figure for new infrastructure along Highway 40 is $175 million. That’s the cost of highway projects that the Missouri Department of Transportation plans, plus infrastructure costs that developers themselves say they can calculate.
Add that to the various projects’ $650 million in development costs and you have enough to pay for three Trans World Domes. Or maybe four domes, by the time all the costs are known.
At the St. Louis County Highway Department and at the state, officials aren’t certain that what they’ve planned so far will handle all the traffic coming along Highway 40.
“Development usually proceeds, and then the development drives the road improvements,” says Donald Spencer, acting director of the county highway department.
“So if the traffic patterns change due to all this new development,” he said, “then we might have to change our priorities for the limited funds we’ve got.”
Paul L. Wojciechowski, the state’s district director of highway planning, said the state’s $70 million plan to widen Highway 40 westward and make other improvements was drawn before some of the latest projects were rolled out.
“But that’s just natural,” he said. “Development is always occurring, and we are always playing catchup.”
Fischesser, at the Muny League, waves that red flag again at the mention of highway widening projects.
“This is the type of thing that fuels a population shift, rather than real growth,” he says, “and everyone pays for it, but only a few people benefit.”
The Peirce Report, published earlier this year by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, also sounded alarms about “staggering” road and infrastructure costs associated with what it called “the region’s extreme helter-skelter development” outward from the city.
Just one statistic from that report: the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council’s finding that while population in the 12-county region grew 36 percent from 1950 to 1990, the amount of developed land soared 355 percent.
