By KERRY SMITH, EDITOR, ST. LOUIS CONSTRUCTION NEWS AND REVIEW MAGAZINE
As the first development in the portion of Premier 370 Business Park north of Highway 370 progresses toward a mid-summer 2021 completion, the City of St. Peters, MO is heralding the success of the park to the tune of 8,000 new jobs created by its tenants over the past 18 months.
Project Smile – a yet-to-be formally identified, last-mile warehouse and distribution facility, is being led by St. Louis-based developer CRG (the development arm of Clayco) and the FasTrac team at the City of St. Peters. The 142,670-square-foot project is the first one to be built on the park’s north end, is situated on 36.4 acres of the park at Highway 370 near Interstate 70 in St. Peters. Premier 370 spans 850 acres for a total of four million square feet of space.
Walls are being erected now for the latest project, whose design includes traditional docks for large trucks on one side of the building and a giant canopy and loading area for many home delivery trucks on the other side.
In terms of jobs creation within the city, Project Smile follows a series of recent tenant buildouts at Premier 370 that are collectively creating thousands of new positions to add to St. Peters’ local economy and to buoy the State of Missouri’s overall jobs statistics.
Julie Powers, director of planning, community and economic development for the City of St. Peters, said 8,000 new jobs created over roughly the past year and a half – at Premier 370 alone – is a number that stands tall within the context of the entire state’s job creation statistics over that same period.
According to Missouri Governor Mike Parson and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Missouri created more than 40,000 new jobs from June 2018 to November 2019.
“When we looked at our number (8,000) in light of the entire state’s total of 40,000, we realized that St. Peters has a pretty big footprint when it comes to job creation,” said Powers.
Existing Premier 370 park tenants sharing in the jobs creation milestone include: Amazon, whose 855,080-square-foot warehouse/distribution site opened in the park during August 2019, projecting to hire 1,500 but actually hiring more than 5,000; RB (Reckitt Beckiser) who hired 400; Grove Collaborative and RB that created 250 more jobs at the site; Medline Industries who generated another 150 jobs; logistics company DMI which opened at the park in 2020, adding 111 jobs; FedEx Ground, which opened its site in mid-2020, hiring 1,200; Dayton Freight who generated 110 jobs; Saia LTL Freight with 160 positions, Central States with 88 new hires and Best Buy which created 36 new jobs.
Additional parcels just east of Project Smile and north of Highway 370 remain available for development.