The state senate decides Missouri should tread carefully into the aerotropolis age. Freight forwarders are about as far forward as the senate wants to go right now. .
Three-hundred million dollars in tax credits for warehouse development have been stripped from the economic development bill. The warehouses would have been part of the development of the St. Louis China trade hub, an aerotropolis as it’s called.
But 60-million dollars in tax credits remain to encourage freight forwarders to use St. Louis instead of Chicago to ship products overseas. Freight forwarders are commercial travel agents who get products to airports for shipment to overseas markets
Senator Schmitt explains what a forwarder is mp3 :27
\Schmitt says Chicago dominates the foreign trade flight business, leaving Lambert-St. Louis airport with no international cargo flights. He hopes the legislation will cause development of trade flights to other parts of the world from St. Louis.
St. Louis leaders are not ready to give up on the full-blown aerotropolis idea. They say they’ll look for other ways to finance the warehouse complexes and might try to get the House to put them into the bill, setting up compromise discussions with the senate later.