MidAmerica's Backers Feel Slighted By Lambert
Airport Marks Its First Year Of Regular Passenger Service
Earnings Are On Track
MidAmerica Airport, Illinois (August 11, 2001) -- MidAmerica Airport, dismissed by critics as the "gateway to nowhere" when it opened in 1998, marks its first year of regular, if limited, passenger service this week. That's a significant milestone, boosters say, even if traffic so far has lagged behind expectations.
"This is a very simple airport, no waiting, easy in and easy out," said Sam Bassi of the United Kingdom.
While MidAmerica slowly is beginning to spark some economic development at its fringes, it has yet to assume the role that St. Clair County officials envisioned for it when it was built amid cornfields 25 miles east of St. Louis - to relieve overcrowding at Lambert Field.
That confounds MidAmerica's supporters, who say a lack of cooperation between the airports bears some of the blame for MidAmerica's slow growth.
Officials with both airports claim to be working in tandem, as they did Thursday night when a TWA jet headed to Lambert from Nashville, Tenn., made an emergency landing at MidAmerica because of a landing gear problem. It was much smarter, air traffic controllers figured, to make the landing at uncrowded MidAmerica than risk a collision at busy Lambert.
St. Clair County and MidAmerica officials say they support the $2.6 billion project known as W-1W to add a third runway at Lambert by 2006. They expect that will bolster Lambert's position as the region's dominant hub airport. Lambert officials say they see MidAmerica as a complement, not a competitor.
John Baricevic, the St. Clair County Board chairman, expects that it will take several years for MidAmerica to generate enough traffic to fulfill its potential. The resurrected Pan American Airways, which offers a single daily flight to Orlando, Fla., drew about 12,000 departing passengers to MidAmerica between its debut there last August and the end of July - a fraction of the 15.3 million people who boarded planes at Lambert last year.
Lambert is spending $2.6 billion - about a dozen times the $213 million it cost to build MidAmerica - to tear down nearly 2,000 houses in Bridgeton and build a 9,000-foot runway. The new runway will allow two planes to land simultaneously in bad weather. When it is finished, the expansion will add about 1,500 acres to the airport for a total of nearly 3,500.
Some 40 miles to the east, MidAmerica sits on 4,500 acres, its 10,000-foot runway surrounded by corn, wheat and soybean fields. There is room to expand the four-gate terminal to add up to 96 more. St. Clair County is busy buying land east of the airport that officials say eventually will add 1,500 acres. A second and third runway will be built there when demand dictates, far enough apart for three jets to land simultaneously in bad weather.
MidAmerica could be doing more to streamline air traffic in and around St. Louis, Baricevic said, if airports and regional leaders on both sides of the Mississippi were working closer together.
"I think that the St. Louis region continues to shoot itself in the foot by not using our airports to maximize capacity," Baricevic said. "But unfortunately, some of our friends in Missouri see any business coming from Lambert to MidAmerica as a loss for the region."
It's that kind of parochialism that scuttled plans in the 1970s to build an airport near Columbia and Waterloo, in Monroe County, Baricevic believes. Missouri politicians, convinced that the state would lose jobs and businesses to Illinois, lobbied the administration of President Jimmy Carter to kill the project. "When we failed to do Columbia-Waterloo, we passed up the opportunity to compete with Chicago and Dallas and Atlanta, the major central United States hubs," Baricevic said. "Now we have to worry about competing with Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Minneapolis - the second tier - and we're about to be passed by."
Reorganization plan faltered
Hastening growth at MidAmerica would be easier, industry experts said, if it fell under the same operating authority as Lambert. In Washington, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority tailored its airports to serve complementary niches, using Reagan National Airport for short-haul flights and sending cross-country and international traffic to Dulles International Airport.
"At the end of the day, both airports benefit because they are under the same umbrella organization," said Steve Lott, business editor of Aviation Daily. "In St. Louis, you have two different groups that are essentially in competition and, you know, that makes it awfully difficult for the city and the surrounding counties to work cooperatively to bring in new service."
A spokesman for Lambert, Michael Donatt, said "there's always been speculation" about folding Lambert and MidAmerica under a single operating authority, "but I don't know that it's amounted to much more than that."
Talks hit a snag over representation on the proposed board, MidAmerica Director Rick Hargrove said. MidAmerica officials wanted the governing body to be divided equally between Missouri and Illinois residents.
Earnings are on track
St. Clair County expects to spend $6.5 million - about 2 percent of the county's $337 million budget - on MidAmerica this year, a figure that includes the airport's $3.5 million operating budget. Much of the rest will go toward paying down the debt the county incurred to build the airport.
Despite an operating deficit expected to hover near $1.5 million, officials say that earnings at the airport are on track, and that the airport was expected to lose money for about five years before turning a profit.
MidAmerica received a moral and financial boost last year with Pan Am's arrival. The airport's fiscal health is expected to improve further early next year with the arrival of Aviation Material & Technical Support, a Chesterfield company that repairs small, corporate jets.
AVMATS is scheduled to begin construction in November on a $1 million, 35,000-square-foot maintenance facility and expects to employ 50 people there by 2004.
Investments "for the future"
Immediately south of MidAmerica on Illinois Route 4, three hulking warehouses stand near a sign advertising development opportunities at AirWorld Centre. The 650-acre industrial park offers the most tangible evidence that MidAmerica slowly is beginning to generate the economic development that St. Clair County officials promised it would when construction began in 1993.
Cablofil Inc. moved into a 77,000-square-foot factory in May. The French company is the world's largest manufacturer of wire-cable trays - baskets that hold cables and wires along walls and ceilings. Next door, Arrow Group Industries Inc., a manufacturer of metal storage sheds, operates a 100,000-square-foot warehouse that opened in 1999. The third warehouse belongs to Jung Warehousing Inc., a warehousing and distribution firm.
All of them have staked their investments on the future of MidAmerica as a regional cargo hub. So has St. Clair County, which earmarked 230 acres at the intersection of Illinois routes 4 and 161 for an industrial park.
"It's a gamble, there is no question," said Sheila Sweeney, the developer of AirWorld Centre. "But we just clearly feel that the airport has a tremendous future. You can't really go farther west on the Missouri side. It's pretty much eaten up, and it's a lot more expensive. This is really the obvious growth corridor."
Land prices south of the airport rose to $15,000 an acre from $9,000 in the early 1990s, said Terry Johnson, a real estate broker who has been involved in most of the land transactions around the airport.
Development remains on hold at the nearby Interstate 64 interchange, where real estate values have increased to around $40,000 an acre from $12,000.
"I think that most of the investments have been made out here for the future," Johnson said, "with the understanding that patience will reward them."
Information provided by the St. Louis Post Dispatch
William Lamb Article © the St. Louis Post Dispatch
| 
Email
Return to Home Page