Local businesses buy space, update systems to help employees, clients
By Angela Mueller, as published in the
St. Louis Business Journal.
With a fleet of more than 40 service vehicles that travel the metropolitan area on a daily basis, Woodard Cleaning & Restoration Services faced a major dilemma with the impending reconstruction of Highway 40.
"We realized we needed to get our ducks into a row if we were going to be running as many trucks as we do," said Scott Dieckgraefe, director of marketing.
The Rock Hill-based company first brought on a new dispatch manager, Jeanine Sabatino, to help manage the fleet.
In addition, Woodard took its dispatch center high-tech, contracting with Tampa, Fla.-based Actsoft on a mobile tracking and mapping software system. The new system will better enable Woodard to map its drivers' routes so they can reduce daily drive time and avoid traveling on Highway 40. The company pays a service fee of less than $900 a month for the Actsoft program.
"I think we're going to minimize the disruption because of the way we set it up," Dieckgraefe said. "If we hadn't been proactive, our trucks would have been stuck in traffic with everyone else."
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New York-based investment firm Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. is opening a Chesterfield office in addition to its Clayton location to better serve its clients and accommodate its employees during the Highway 40 project.
"We were thinking of our employees and their quality of life," said Gary Wideman, managing director-investments and branch manager. "We have many that live in the West County corridor, and we wanted them to have the opportunity to work out that way without dealing with the headache of commuting."
Wideman said many of the firm's clients are based in the western portion of the region as well.
Oppenheimer will occupy 5,000 square feet of office space at 16401 Swingley Ridge Road starting April 1. Wideman said approximately 10 percent of the firm's 60 local employees will work out of the Chesterfield office initially. He said the firm is committed long term to the Chesterfield office and would like to eventually increase its sales force there.
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The Regus Group opened its third local business center in Chesterfield in late January, hoping to capitalize on the demand for satellite office space in the western area of the region during the Highway 40 construction.
The more than 24,000-square-foot St. Louis Chesterfield Center features 90 fully equipped, leasable office suites. The center is currently about 25 percent occupied, according to General Manager Scott Ellinger, who said interest is rising as work begins on the Highway 40 project.
"We have seen a lot of folks along that 64/40 corridor looking for alternatives, particularly companies that have employees in St. Charles, Wildwood and Wild Horse Creek," Ellinger said. "We're getting a lot of inquiries from law firms and accountants in the Clayton area. I'm giving tours almost every day to people who are seriously concerned about the Highway 40 situation."
Rates at the Chesterfield Center, located at 100 Chesterfield Business Parkway, range from $175 to $3,000 a month, depending on the size of the office and the amount of time the tenant plans to spend there.
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THF Realty and Mark S. Mehlman Realty have joined forces to promote their properties in Clayton in light of the Highway 40 project.
The firms have launched a "get the community without the commute" campaign to promote condo living at THF's The Plaza in Clayton and Mehlman's Crescent developments. The campaign, which is costing the two firms jointly about $40,000, features two billboards - one on Highway 40 and one on Interstate 170 - and some print advertising.
"You usually don't see side-by-side projects teaming up like that," said Marian Nunn, THF's chief operating officer.
Both THF and Mehlman have reported increased interest in their condo developments since the Highway 40 project was announced. "We've seen a lot of people from Wildwood, Chesterfield and other places out west who work in Clayton or downtown looking at this area as the place to buy," said Josh Corson, principal with Mehlman.
Development continues at the Crescent, and the first units, which range in price from $1 million to $2 million, will be available in September. Corson said 45 of the 72 available units have been sold. Nunn said "only a handful" of condos remain available at The Plaza, where units range in price from $900,000 to $3 million.
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Arthur Hill & Co. LLC of Evanston, Ill., purchased its third office building in St. Louis and plans to market the space to businesses seeking relief from the Highway 40 project. Arthur Hill closed in early February on the $10.1 million purchase of the Park 270 I building, located at 1807 Park 270 Drive, from its previous owner, 270 Park Inc.
The five-story, 120,000-square-foot building is located in the Olive/270/West Port submarket, just south of Page Avenue and Interstate 270.
"In light of the fact that Highway 40 is going to make getting in and out of downtown a problem, we are going to seek to attract those who want ready space," said Bruce Reid, Arthur Hill's executive vice president. "Instead of the usual four- to five-month lead time, space will be immediately available. We suspect that as the construction begins and people feel the full impact, they might decide life is too short to tough it out and will choose to relocate or will open a satellite that's convenient to get to." Spec suites will range between 800 and 2,500 square feet.
Reid said the company also is planning to build a structure adjoining the two office buildings that will include a conference center, café and exercise room. That development would total about $1 million. Art Kerckhoff of Colliers Turley Martin Tucker is Arthur Hill's leasing agent for Park 270. Listed rental rates in the building range between $21 and $22 per square foot.
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Textron Financial Corp. moved its local offices last summer from Clayton to Corporate Hill, at Interstate 270 and Manchester Road, partly in response to the upcoming Highway 40 reconstruction project.
The commercial finance company's lease in the Windsor Building in Clayton, where it had been located for 10 years, had come due, and Frank Ford, senior vice president and general manager, decided it was time for a change.
"Traffic was already bad, and it was going to get much, much worse," he said. The firm conducted an analysis of where its 50 employees lived and determined that moving west would improve the commute for 45 of them.
Textron's local office is now located in 16,000 square feet at 1630 Des Peres Road.
"We decided it made sense for us to move," Ford said. "We didn't have to be in the Clayton area, and Clayton is much more expensive."
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TriStar Properties recently moved its Chesterfield office to Earth City, leaving its former 5,155-square-foot office at 390 S. Woods Mill Road vacant and fully furnished. Because its lease doesn't expire until early 2009, TriStar now is seeking to sublease the space to downtown and Clayton businesses looking for temporary space in Chesterfield as a result of the Highway 40 construction. The company is asking $21.50 per square foot for the space.
The firm sent a direct mail piece advertising the space to law and accounting firms located downtown. According to Michael Towerman, TriStar president, several interested companies have toured the space in recent weeks.
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The
American Red Cross
is always focused on emergency response, so it's accustomed to planning for huge events such as the Highway 40 project. Nancy Bates, the St. Louis Area Chapter's executive officer of emergency services, said that in response to the construction, the local Red Cross will add a disaster action team closer to the city than its current headquarters in Creve Coeur. The team will be based at the Red Cross' Missouri-Illinois Blood Services Region building at 4050 Lindell Blvd.
Bates said the location was chosen after Red Cross research determined that 60 percent of the area's fires the Red Cross responds to occur in north St. Louis County and the city of St. Louis. Fires make up most of the 1,100 local single-family incidents the Red Cross responds to each year, she said.
The Lindell location will be equipped with one emergency vehicle and all the necessary equipment. Bates said the Red Cross needs volunteers for Lindell's disaster action team in order to reach its goal of 60 volunteers for that location.
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Mid-America Transplant Services, which connects organs and organ donors with people who need organs, is making arrangements to shift some aircraft it uses from Spirit of St. Louis Airport in Chesterfield to St. Louis Downtown Airport in Sauget to ensure speedy delivery of organs during the highway 40 project.
Mid-America Transplant now flies exclusively from Spirit, where it has a twin-engine King Air and charters jets for organs that need to be delivered from more than a few hundred miles away, said Dan Kappel, the transplant service's president and chief executive.
"This will be more of an inconvenience," he said of the roadwork. "We're also initiating discussions with helicopter companies" about using those services locally.
The company also is moving from its current offices in Olivette to new space it has leased at the Highlands, on Oakland Avenue across Highway 40 from Forest Park. That move should come next year, Kappel said.
"It (the highway construction) would have an impact even if we stayed put. One of the selling points for the Highlands was, we will have access to both U.S. 40/I-64 and I-44," he said. "We're not a 9-to-5 business, and a lot of what we do happens when people are sleeping."
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Bryan Cave is rolling out an online data center with a server that is "sufficient in size so that every lawyer could work from home online at one time," according to Peter Van Cleve, managing partner of the law firm's St. Louis office. Van Cleve said the firm made the decision to upgrade its technology in part because of the Highway 40 construction and also as part of its disaster preparedness plan. He declined to disclose how much the firm is investing in the technology but said, "We spend a significant amount of our budget on technology to make sure we are well-prepared."
Bryan Cave has 632 employees in its downtown offices.
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BJC HealthCare is working on plans to ensure that patients are able to easily access its facilities during the Highway 40 project. The health-care system, which is the region's largest employer with 26,000 employees, operates two hospitals along the highway - Barnes-Jewish and Missouri Baptist Medical Center.
The company is coordinating with the Missouri Department of Transportation to place signs, along 40 and alternative routes such as Interstate 44, to help patients know how to access the hospitals, said June Fowler, vice president of corporate and public communications for BJC.
The health-care system plans to include information about alternate routes in routine reminder calls made to patients in the days before scheduled appointments. BJC also will strive to make non-emergency appointments during non-peak drive times, Fowler said.
In addition, the company plans to help keep employees off the highway during periods of high congestion by scheduling meetings at off times and using conference calls as much as possible, she said.
"There are other things that we are just in the beginning stages of looking at," Fowler said. "We want to make sure we have appropriate policies in place, but it's hard to have a telecommuting policy for a nurse."
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Representatives from Ameren have attended meetings organized by MoDOT and the Downtown St. Louis Partnership to help them determine how the Highway 40 construction will affect the 1,400 employees that work at the company's downtown campus. The utility also performed a ZIP code analysis of where its employees live and work to better understand the impact of delays along Highway 40.
According to spokeswoman Susan Gallagher, Ameren has added a second shuttle bus to transport employees from mass transit stops to campus and made route changes to get employees closer to their jobs within the campus, and it is working with other downtown employers on the possibility of coordinating efforts.
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Washington University last summer launched a University Transit Pass program in cooperation with Metro. The program provides faculty, staff and full-time students with a free Metro Pass. As of last fall, nearly 17,000 passes had been issued.
Dr. James Crane, associate vice chancellor for clinical affairs and chief executive of the Faculty Practice Plan, is leading a Washington University-BJC HealthCare joint task force addressing the construction along Highway 40. The university has placed on its Internet home page a link to the latest information from MoDOT on regional roadwork. In addition, the school already offers to many of its employees options such as flex schedules and compressed workweeks, which will allow them to avoid peak travel times on Highway 40.
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