Photograph by Josh Monken
The closure of the Chrysler plants in 2009 cost the region 7,000 jobs. But St. Louis County officials still hope a resurrection is possible.
The south plant has been razed, and it appeared at press time that the north plant would face the same fate. But Denny Coleman, president and CEO of the St. Louis County Economic Council, says the county continues to talk with bankruptcy trustee Capstone Advisory Group about the site’s future.
“It’s a big challenge,” Coleman concedes. “On the positive side, it’s typically been a strong business corridor for manufacturing. The site itself has a lot of assets: rail, power generation, and accessibility to the highway and markets.” Proximity to Interstate 44 makes some retail development likely, he says. But the county prefers to see manufacturing fill the gap.
Coleman, who spearheaded the region’s recovery from losing 60,000 defense jobs in the early ’90s, says the situation in Fenton is similar. “We used the challenge to look for new opportunities in other sectors,” he says. “That’s exactly the process we are going through right now.” Likely suspects include pharmaceutical, brokerage/financial services, and IT sectors. “The auto industry will probably never come back to the way it was in the region,” Coleman says. “But it will be productive at some time in the future. The site is too well-situated to sit there for too long.”
