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Southwestern Illinois is trying to one-up Missouri by offering more than double the amount of free land it will make available as the states compete for a federal spy agency’s new regional headquarters.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin joined local elected leaders at a news conference Monday to tout the latest move in the bid for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency relocation project, which officials hope will lure more than 3,000 high-tech jobs from St. Louis.
St. Clair County officials are offering at least 200 more acres to go with the county’s earlier gift of a 182-acre tract near MidAmerica Airport. Durbin compared the presumed ease of the shovel-ready county land with a location on the north side of St. Louis that will require city officials there to relocate some houses and invoke eminent domain against unwilling sellers.
“There’s a choice,” said Durbin, an East St. Louis native. “We can buy a lawsuit, or we can move right in. … It’s a location that has no surprises.”
Maggie Crane, a spokeswoman for St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, called the Illinois offer “a political move” that involves extra space the secretive defense and intelligence agency, a combat support branch of the Department of Defense, wouldn’t need. But she added that St. Louis officials are prepared to offer more acreage to their proposal.
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency spokesman David Berczek said the agency had not yet received the revised proposal from Illinois.
An announcement of the preferred project site is expected in March.
NGA also is eyeing two sites in south St. Louis County for a $1.6 billion relocation that remains years away. But most expect the choice to boil down to either the north St. Louis site or the one across the state line.
St. Louis estimates it would lose more than $2 million annually in earnings taxes paid by those who work in the city — regardless of where they live — should the federal agency leave town.
Illinois’ other U.S. senator, Republican Mark Kirk, is also pushing for the suburban St. Louis location in southwestern Illinois.
In a Nov. 10 letter to the federal agency’s director, Kirk highlighted the risks of stretching fiber optic cable from the base’s Defense Information Systems Agency — what he called “the IT keepers of the entire military, and a key component in the security of NGA West’s classified work” — to a Missouri location more than 20 miles away.
He also noted that the agency’s eastern headquarters in northern Virginia is adjacent to the U.S. Army’s Fort Belvoir.
