The draft Environmental Impact Statement confirms what I have said from the beginning of this competition: the Northside site in the City of St. Louis would advance NGA’s vital mission, deliver maximum economic benefits, provide taxpayers with the greatest return on this $1.6 billion federal investment, and support President Obama’s stated objective to use federal dollars to transform urban failure into urban success.
When I was a young man, I used to visit my great-grandmother who lived near the proposed new site for NGA. It was a vibrant neighborhood, every home was full, every corner had a store, and we had a real sense of community.
That’s not the way it is today. But if we win this competition, we can return the Northside to a vibrant center of jobs, new housing, new economic development and reconnect it to the larger community as a place of pride and accomplishment.
Just across the street from the proposed NGA site is the former footprint of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. In the federal government, we don’t often have an opportunity to replace a great federal failure with an enormous federal victory, one that will transform a distressed and badly disinvested neighborhood – that is the unprecedented opportunity that NGA really represents.
Seventy-five years ago, the War Department built the world’s largest small arms ammunition plant in North St. Louis. North St. Louis was truly a key hub in what President Roosevelt described as the “arsenal of democracy.”
Today, the “ammunition” that defends America is digital information, the very thing that NGA does around the clock, every day, to arm our military and intelligence agencies with the very best chance to succeed in their missions.
They say that history repeats itself. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if NGA relocated to Northside, so that once again North St. Louis could be at the very center of defending freedom?
That is my vision for this project, and I also want to commend Paul McKee Jr. and Northside Regeneration for their vision and risk-taking which helped assemble this outstanding site.
And I want to thank Governor Jay Nixon, Mayor Francis Slay, County Executive Steve Stenger, the Missouri State Legislature, the Board of Aldermen, and the St. Louis Development Corporation for joining me to create unprecedented public-private collaboration at the federal, state and local levels as we strive together to achieve this #1 economic development priority for our community.
We don’t often have an opportunity to replace a great federal failure with an enormous federal victory
