MISSOURI: The Perfect Center
traffic. The airport has abundant available capacity. It’s also uniquely positioned for logistics. “We have all the infrastructure in place that would be required of any kind of logistics business,” says Brian Kinsey, the airport authority’s assistant director, marketing and business development. That infrastructure includes numer- ous highways near the airport, as well as “rail service that comes right into the airport,” Kinsey says. “Shipments com- ing in by air can be readily distributed by surface transportation without the congestion and other issues that some air- ports experience.” As part of its effort to attract more cargo, the Airport Authority is devel- oping 80 acres on the north side of the property. “We also have another 100-plus acres that can have access to the air field
Kansas City International Airport is the largest cargo airport in Missouri and five adjacent states.
EASTERN MISSOURI: Mississippi River Magnet
new employer in the area is a lab belonging to Human Identification Technologies, a forensics science lab based in Redlands, Calif. “It chose Kirksville because of the two universities there,” Ipson says. A collection of intermodal facilities tied to Mississippi River ports is one of the big attractions in Missouri’s “Bootheel” in the south- eastern corner of the state. More than 200 miles of the Mississippi River borders this region. At the northern end of that stretch, the Southeast Missouri Regional Port Authority is close to the Cape Girardeau Airport and has a six-mile short line railroad on the prop- erty. “Also, the New Madrid and Pemiscot County Port Authorities both have slack water harbors and rail,” says Buz Sutherland, exec- utive director of the Southeast Missouri Economic Development Alliance in Portageville. Adjacent to the New Madrid County Port Authority, the Saint Jude Industrial Park encompasses 4,200 acres, including 1,720 acres available for development, and five miles of railroad. For companies developing sites in Southeast Missouri, the region’s flat topogra- phy offers a particular advantage. “We have thousands of acres of shovel-ready industrial sites located on or near the interstate and U.S. highway systems,” Sutherland says. One of the most recent arrivals in Southeast Missouri is Orgill, a wholesale distributor of home improvement products, which is con- solidating and modernizing its distribution network with a new, 795,000-square-foot facility under construction in Sikeston. Access to major highways and inexpensive electrical power were big draws for Orgill.
Road, river, and rail create a powerful combination for logis- tics operations in eastern Missouri. To the north of I-70, the region anchored by Hannibal and Kirksville is seeing rapid growth in its transportation infrastructure. Now that construction on the Avenue of the Saints (U.S. 61), the corridor that connects St. Louis and St. Paul, Minn., is complete, Missouri and Iowa are collaborating on highway upgrades to create the “Corridor of the Capitals” (U.S. 63) between Jefferson City and Des Moines. West of Hannibal, Missouri is upgrading U.S. 36 to four lanes, making it an extension to I-72 and connecting I-55 with I-35 and I-29. “Those improvements really open up Northeast Missouri,” says Gordon Ipson, manager of economic development for the Northeast Missouri Electric Power Cooperative in Palmyra and vice president of the Northeast Missouri Development Partnership, a coalition of 13 counties. The new Mid-America Port Authority is building its first port in Quincy, Ill., just across the Mississippi north of Hannibal, giving the region its first full-featured river port. “There are already places along the river where barges are loaded and unloaded, but this will be a multi-modal port facility,” Ipson says. “It will connect rail to the river port and, of course, the highway.” As a rural area, Northeast Missouri offers a ready work force with a strong work ethic. Major employers in the region include General Mills and BASF in Hannibal, and Adair Foods, a division of Kraft Foods, in Kirksville. All three are examples of the strong value-added agricultural and agriculture-related business segment in the area. A
84 Inbound Logistics • September 2009
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