Commerce OKs widening trade zone near airport
By TLogan@post-dispatch.com">Tim Logan ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Tuesday, Feb. 17 2009
The portal for foreign goods to enter St. Louis just got a whole lot bigger. The U.S. Department of Commerce gave its OK last week to expand the region's Foreign Trade Zone by more than 825 acres. County officials say it's a big boost for the ongoing plan to develop a Chinese air cargo hub around Lambert.
The zone, which currently is limited to 11 acres of warehouse space in north St. Louis, will grow to include four large tracts of land around Lambert-St. Louis International Airport: the 550-acre NorthPark development east of Lambert, the Hazelwood Commerce Center and Lindbergh Distribution Center northwest of the airport and 75 acres of old hangar space on the north side of Lambert's runways.
Much of the land — the mostly vacant NorthPark and Hazelwood Commerce Center —is being developed by McEagle Properties, whose chairman, Paul McKee, has beena strong proponent of the China hub project and helped kick-start talks on it last year. Now it will be well-positioned to be an international trading ground.
The zones are intended to lower the cost of trade by reducing customs taxes on goods that move through them. They often house distribution and sometimes assembly plants for imports and exports. That's what local officials have planned for the Lambert zone, where they hope the proposed cargo hub will attract shipping and light manufacturing firms from both China and across the Midwest.
"The Foreign Trade Zone expansion is another step forward in a long-term effort by community leaders to increase our position in the global marketplace," said St. Louis County Executive Charlie A. Dooley. "These expansion sites are part of our re-investment strategy and key locations for businesses engaged in international trade."
The region also has a Foreign Trade Zone at the Tri-City Port District in Madison County, which has about 2,000 jobs and processed $6.3 billion worth of imports in 2006, according to the National Association of Free Trade Zones. All told, the nation's 256 zones conducted $491 billion in business that year, according to the trade group.
Area leaders have been talking with Chinese officials for nearly a year about developing the cargo hub, and the region recently received $1.7 million in federal money to help fund a Midwest-China Hub Commission to study the matter further. That commission, headed by Dooley's chief aide Mike Jones, will spend the next several months studying demand for China-bound goods from the Midwest. Local leaders also expect to send a second trade delegation to China later this spring.
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