Freight district to form committees to look at freight plans

In order to help guide the future of the Regional Freight District created by BiState Development, district officials are looking to form committees with volunteers from the private sector.

The groups would include a policy committee, a marketing plan committee and a freight development plan committee, Regional Freight District Executive Director Mary Lamie said Wednesday during a Greater Belleville Chamber of Commerce Issues and Eggs breakfast.

“What we would like to do is have a kickoff workshop sometime early spring, where we would bring them all together at one time, better introduce the freight district, and more importantly collectively give us input on some of the goals and objectives I talked about today,” Lamie said.

During the event, Lamie discussed the recently released freight study and the growth opportunities for St. Clair County.

The freight study calls for the promotion of Southwestern Illinois as a premier Midwest freight hub and increased investment in the transportation network for more reliable shipments, among other things.

The study compared the St. Louis region to “peer” cities, including Kansas City, Memphis, Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio, which have aggressive marketing campaigns and overshadowed the St. Louis region when it came to freight, Lamie said.

When compared to these peer cities, St. Louis is the largest freight hub with significant presence of all transportation modes.

Lamie said 210 million tons of freight move through the region, through trucking, rail, barges and pipelines.

She promoted the region’s strengths including being central to U.S. manufacturing, having specialized industries in the area, and having a range of modal options, including highways, airports, railroads and pipelines.

“We are strategically located on the Mississippi River,” Lamie said. “It’s not that we’re centrally located in the Midwest; we are south of the lock and dams. The lock and dams act like a set of traffic signals, which adds time and money to your cost in moving product.”

The region including St. Louis, St. Charles, Jefferson and Franklin counties in Missouri, and St. Clair, Madison and Monroe counties in Illinois is fragmented and doesn’t do a good job of setting transportation priorities, Lamie said.

She said there needs to be coordination in planning transportation priorities such as paying for bridge replacements and road upgrades and linking the private and public sectors.

“There will be days where you have six of those counties supporting a project that is taking place in another county, but it’s going to be my job (to) demonstrate how that project, from an economic development perspective, how it benefits the entire region,” Lamie said.

St. Clair County Board Chairman Mark Kern said growth in freight would be a “game changer” for the St. Louis region.

“This is the biggest thing to come around in a long time. This is going to be a huge jobs generator,” Kern said. “When we get going with Mary’s program, we start building infrastructure, replacing railroad bridges that are 140 years old that will connect us with Missouri, those types of things will create jobs in the future, for our future generations to work in the transportation industry.”

Lamie said she is aiming to start the committees in the early spring and plans to call them the freight way alliance. The number of volunteers from the private sector is to be determined, but they are looking for members from throughout the St. Louis region.

“That group is really the key to our success as part of keeping that information and allowing us to move forward,” Lamie said.

This story was originally published December 2, 2015 at 9:15 AM with the headline "Freight district to form committees to look at freight plans."