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Old Posted Mar 18, 2013, 6:26 PM
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Evergrey Evergrey is offline
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St. Louis region seeks ways to reconnect its economy with the river

http://www.stltoday.com/business/loc...79ee0b244.html

Quote:
St. Louis region seeks ways to reconnect its economy with the river



ST. LOUIS •

Drive up North Broadway, with its wall of old brick warehouses. Pass Produce Row and the heaps of scrap metal at Grossman Steel. Continue beneath an abandoned railroad trestle that’s being converted to an aerial bicycle path and bump over an iron track where the Burlington Northern Santa Fe runs daily. And you will get to where Otis Williams sees a land of opportunity.

Across the river in Granite City, in a half-empty former Army base that has an ethanol plant in the corner and a steel mill up the street, Dennis Wilmsmeyer sees the same kind of potential. And 30 miles south in Herculaneum, Dan Govero sees the chance to bring jobs to a town that needs them badly.

From the city’s industrial underbelly to the bluffs of Jefferson County, there are big plans afoot these days along the Mississippi River. Port officials such as Williams, Wilmsmeyer and Govero are pushing ahead with major investments. Several private companies are upgrading their docks, too. Studies are under way on how to better integrate the region’s freight and logistics networks. And all of it is aimed at making the dirty, slow river into a bigger asset in today’s just-in-time global economy, reconnecting the region to its very reason for being.

From a big expansion of the Panama Canal to worldwide demand for what’s grown in America’s breadbasket to a slow but steady reshoring of manufacturing from Asia back to the West, the contours of how goods move across the globe are shifting in ways that could make an old river town more central to the world’s commerce once more.

But it remains far from clear how much of that commerce will move through St. Louis — barge traffic here was flat for a decade before bumping up in 2011. And even if it comes, the last few years of high and then low water have shown how the Mississippi can be an unreliable partner in commerce, raising questions about how much the big river will ever mean to St. Louis’ economy again.

There was a time, of course, when the river meant everything.

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