MRCO News|

"The Mahoning River Committee Presents Master Plan for Corridor"

by Dennis LaRue

~Business Journal, November, 2002

 

In the Mahoning River Corridor of Opportunity - 1.471 acres on both banks of the river from the old Pennsylvania & Lake Erie Railroad Yard near Lowellville to Youngstown -there one day may be up to 7,400 workers housed in 75 buildings with a combined 7.13 million square feet.

These workers and their employers would pay Struthers, Campbell and Youngstown more than $3.6 million a year in income taxes and the 75 buildings where they would work would generate nearly another $5.3 million in property taxes.

Those were among the goals outlined Oct. 30 by the planning committee of the Mahoning River Corridor of Opportunity, whose chairman, Struthers Mayor Dan Mamula, presented its master site plan to spend $25 million on improvements over 20 years.

The Mahoning River Corridor of Opportunity is the "largest and broadest-based partnership" in the region, Mamula says. Its membership consists of the cities of Struthers, Campbell and Youngstown, Mahoning County, Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber, Mahoning Valley Economic Development Corp., Eastgate Regional Council of Governments, and CASTLO.  The first tangible step will occur in 2004 when the new Walton Avenue bridge estimated cost $3.4 million is built as the first step of providing easier ingress and egress to the corridor.

What the master site plan hopes to provide, says John Getchey, Eastgate executive director, is the layout of where the 75 buildings will be located and the extent to which development is commercial and industrial. Location of the buildings and their infrastructure needs will determine where the roads and bridges will be built and sewers and water lines laid.  "There is far more productive land in the corridor than is realized," says William DeCicco, executive director of CASTLO lndustrial Park.

In the corridor, from Performance Place Industrial Park in Youngstown, to CASTLO in Struthers, are 2,000 workers. Fully developed, that number could reach 7,500, even 8,000, DeCicco says. That is well below the 20,000 who worked in the steel mills that once lined the banks of the Mahoning River, he allows, but the corridor can return to the level of prosperity those mills once provided.

The corridor consists of 635 acres in Youngstown, 384 acres in Campbell and 452 in Struthers.  Serving the corridor are "two first-class railroads, the Norfolk & Southern and CSXT, and two short lines," DeCicco notes, one of them the Ohio Central.

The environmental hazards left from the former steel mills are not nearly as severe as once believed, he adds. Further, the state and U.S. Environmental Protection Agencies are funding remediation. In the plan, the Mahoning River will one day be dredged and be made usable for recreation, Getchey says. The plan provides for 25 acres of open space and 8.2 miles of bike trails.

To critics who complain about the seeming slow pace of developing the corridor, Mamula points out that since he proposed the Mahoning River Corridor of Opportunity in 1995, the Center Street bridge in Youngstown has been replaced, the Bridge Street (Ohio Route 616) bridge in Struthers has been replaced, a soccer field has been built atop an old slag heap in his downtown and three baseball fields in Cene Park have been built, and Astro Shapes has expanded.

Mamula praised the cooperation he's received from Campbell Mayor John Dill and saluted Youngstown and Mahoning County for providing matching funds so state and federal monies could be obtained to build infrastructure, including the Walton Avenue bridge.

The plan for the four-mile stretch can be viewed online (www.cityofstruthers.com).