Landfill Plan Sparks Fight Over Floodplain Development
Date Posted: June 17, 2019
Posted In: Projects,
From E&E News: An old golf course along the Mississippi River was piled high with construction debris after the Great Flood of 1993 covered it in muddy water. Now two developers want to resurrect the site by building a retail and entertainment complex, despite concerns that it could flood again.
The project would be the largest riverside attraction to be built in the last 40 years in St. Louis. It’s a $400 million proposal called Lighthouse Landing, replete with a marina, hotel, retail boardwalk, indoor waterpark and lighthouse.
It’s the vision of two men, Anthony Daniele and Mark Repking.
The first is a former St. Louis police officer, the second a onetime banker and trustee of Southern Illinois University. Both were convicted of financial crimes, and both have served prison sentences.
As part of their reentry to private life, the men, who had no prior relationship to each other and whose crimes were unrelated, forged a business partnership to receive “clean fill” from public construction and demolition sites across the city.
Nine years later, the landfill is full and graded flat, and Pier St. Louis has earned about $500,000 in waste disposal fees.
And the vision of building a riverbank destination is getting closer to reality.
“We’re going to have the thing master-planned,” Repking said in a telephone interview this week from his home in Illinois. “There is no other place in St. Louis like this. We’ve got some really interesting people coming in there.”
But major developments in floodplains don’t happen overnight or without public scrutiny and government engagement.
Environmental groups and public watchdogs, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, have been beating a drum against the development for years.
Devastating floods this spring, the second-largest in St. Louis’ history, brought the landfill and development proposal back into public view.
The site is one of the few high-and-dry riverfront parcels in north St. Louis, an area characterized by the Chain of Rocks water treatment plant, the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District’s Watkins Creek sewage pump station and other industrial sites.
“Right now, it’s probably 5 feet from the river being up on our property. That’s why I can sit here and tell you it will never flood,” Repking said.
But critics say the developers are not accounting for the No. 1 risk faced by riverfront real estate up and down the Mississippi. It’s the unpredictability of the river itself, which has seen a string of major floods over the last decade.
Four of the 10 highest river crests at St. Louis have occurred since 2013, according to National Weather Service data going back to the 1840s. And this year’s flood season isn’t over.