Cape Girardeau Mayor Pro Tem John Voss gave a review of 2012 and plans for 2013 for the City of Cape Girardeau at a Town Hall Meeting held on December 4, 2012. The event was sponsored by the League of Women Voters and was held at the Cape Girardeau Public Library.
TRANSCRIPT
So, I'd like to touch on really three different areas for the 2012 year in review for the City of Cape Girardeau. I'll talk about how we're trying to enhance our status as a regional hub and the impact of economic development on that and then some quality of life issues.
On enhancing our status as a regional hub -- there are many, many great things going on in Cape Girardeau. Cape Girardeau is on a roll...almost wanted to quote Ike and Tina Turner about rolling on the river...but Cape has had a great year in 2012. We've started a metropolitan planning organization that's brought together many entities from the region to help us figure out how we can leverage our scale to attract more business and more improvements for everyone living in the region.
In an economic development sense, we've had a great year. So, many of our existing businesses have
announced expansions or have completed those expansions. Proctor & Gamble has announced a major expansion, over 300 million dollars and add 50 new jobs. NARS is expanding, QC Corporation and Biokyowa have announced expansions. And we've had new businesses choose to come to Cape Girardeau. So, the Menards facility on Siemers Drive is open and added 140 jobs. Academy Sports is currently in construction and they are expected to add upwards of 100 jobs, another sports franchise in town. And then probably the gorilla in the community, the Isle of Capri Casino has opened its doors effective October 30, I believe. And they brought in over 700 jobs, or over 400 full-time equivalent jobs.
But our economic presense is made in many different ways, so if you look at our education system, our
university has grown, they've got record enrollment this year and they're also building to continue to keep pace with that enrollment. So their 58 million dollar bond issue is going towards improvements on campus, so the new dormitory, River Campus expansion and Academic Hall renovations that are currently happening.
Our local school system also is completing some of the projects that voters approved. So, you might notice
that Cape Central High School now has its own football stadium and not playing in Houck Field anymore.
Lorimier Library at our Junior High School has been open and a ribbon cutting was held recently as well as the new Franklin School on the same grounds where old Franklin School was.
We are a medical center for the region and both of our medical facilities have continued to expand. In
fact, St. Francis Medical Center just had a groundbreaking for another "Building on Excellence" program to build a 125 million dollar expansion to their facility there.
But large businesses are not the only ones prospering, we've actually had small business growth as well. If
you've noticed that we've made some improvements on Broadway and even during the construction process on Broadway, we had six new businesses open and six businesses remodel their facades along the way.
We are continuing to work to draw new major industry into town and have some negotiations currently
underway and are looking to finalize an area where we'd like to try and bring more businesses in with
perhaps an industrial park. We can have a park and we can have businesses but you have to have roads and bridges to get here and so we're glad to report that the I-66 corridor progress is continuing so the route study and the environmental impact study has been funded and that work is currently happening as well.
I mentioned earlier the casino came to town and we were able to make some improvements to our
infrastructure with the cooperation of the casino. So, we were able to realign North Main Street with 177
and improve that area of our community. We also were also able to improve Broadway as I mentioned but
that's never done and so we really want to make sure that our businesses on Broadway and the community continues to embrace the vitality of Broadway, so we've still got benches and trash receptacles and some of those amenities to complete but really don't ever want that project to ever be done -- to continue to beautify our city.
The council did pass a public arts policy, so we'll have a program where we can bring arts into our
community on Broadway and in part of our parks as well and then just this week we've opened up additional parking for Broadway. So we have an agreement with Trinity Lutheran Church where I think we added 50 new spots in cooperation with them to try and relieve some of the concerns that we've heard from both residents and businesses about parking along the Broadway corridor.
We have come to an agreement on how we'd like to invest any monies that we get from the casino, that's all on the Cape Girardeau website, you can look at that. But there's really four areas there so there are capital improvements that we'd like to make, we'd like to use some of the money for an "as promised" fund to help with the regional growth. We are going to be making some innovation investments. One of those that comes to mind is the new leaf trucks, so those are the types of innovations that we are trying to make where we can reduce the amount of man-hours it takes to go collect leaves in the community and can actually extend that season much longer. And then the fourth area that we're really talking about is an endowment fund, so how can we take some of the revenue that we get from this casino and create a legacy or endowment for many generations to come to benefit from this asset to our community.
Finally, let me talk about quality of life issues. We have spend a lot of time this year trying to improve
the quality of life in Cape Girardeau and were recognized throughout the state for that and folks
recognized that they want to be a part of that. So, we've hosted some very special events. The Special
Olympics continues to come to town for their state olympics. As has the Missouri State High Schools
Activities Association with the state volleyball championship which continues to come to Cape.
I mentioned the leaf program. We are building a new wastewater treatment facility. As [Jackson] Mayor Lohr mentioned, that wasn't entirely at our choice. We had to partner with some higher government authorities to bring that to life and figure out how to finance that. We have been able to get to all well water for the City of Cape Girardeau. So this summer you may have noticed a slight change in the taste of our water because now 100% of our water is coming from wells versus directly taken in from the river.
Other ordinances and initiatives that we've taken this year is to try and improve the housing stock in our
community. So, we've now passed and in effect now, a landlord-tenant ordinance, where we are trying to make sure that housing stock in our community is really meeting some basic standards for livability.
We've been presented and now have got to figure out how to fund both the Capaha Park and the Trails
masterplan. That's a very important part of our community. Capaha Park is our crown jewel the trail gets an unbelievable amount of usage and so we're trying to bring some amenities to the existing Cape LaCroix Trail and looking for other opportunities to expand our trail and biking system, so we now have bike lanes in the community and are also trying to expand the amount of lanes or area that we have for those types of things.
There have been a couple of disappointments this year that we're continuing to work diligently on. Our
federal building on Broadway - I know Presiding Commissioner Tracy spoke about that last year -- it is
currently for sale and we're just keeping an eye on that building. An unoccupied building doesn't get
better by itself. And then our Commander relationship at the airport -- we continue to work with the
bankruptcy court to make sure that we are able to try and bring some good out of that situation.
Next year promises to be an exciting year as well. We have several things that we will be taking on as a
council. We've begun to look at a facilities master plan, so we have some major unfunded capital needs.
City Hall is a dated place for us and we know it's not always accessible to those of us that don't have all
of our physical capacities. Our police station needs to be improved. Our police station is a bit out of
date. And then a transfer station -- that was one of the agreements we made as we went through with some of the waste water treatment that we need to improve our transfer station and recycling of some goods from businesses as well.
There will be a couple of votes coming up in April. Ms. Swan, as you know, announced and accepted the
election for State Representative, so we'll need to replace Kathy. And then the urban deer vote will be
happening in April as well. That was an issue that got a lot of press this past year.
We continue to make investments in our community with our Transportation Trust Fund, as well as storm water improvements. Today is an appropriate day to talk about storm water. So, we continue to make improvements there.
2012 has been a great year. The city is on a roll. 2013 promises to be even better. We have a fantastic
staff at City Hall...would welcome comments or questions from anyone both to staff and anyone on the
council or the major and appreciate this opportunity to be here today. Thank you.
