The Greater Montgomery County Economic Development Council and the Montgomery County Commission have scheduled an open house meeting at Montgomery County Middle School to present a master plan to create a mega-site industrial park in the county.

The 90-minute event will start at 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 7 at the school’s multipurpose room for property owners, citizens and other stakeholders who are interested in attending. Steve Etcher, a consultant for the GMCEDC, said the informative meeting will explain how the project will help attract industrial opportunities to the community.

“The idea of this meeting coming up is letting people in the area know what our vision is, why we’re doing that, what the advantage is in having a plan like this in place and what that result will produce,” Etcher said.

Etcher said GMCEDC worked with the state of Missouri for several years to make plans to put a mega-site industrial park in the county because the state is in need of large scale manufacturers and ready-to-develop sites for these projects.

“We identified that as a really unique opportunity for this corridor,” Etcher said. “We’ve been working with the state for literally years in advancing this idea in this concept. In 2023, the state provided us with money that actually developed a plan as to what that development would look like and the impact that it would have.”

M&H Architects, a firm based in St. Louis, was hired to develop the master plan. Etcher said it has put together a team of companies to help guide the planning effort.

“We had a number of highly qualified firms that were put together to work on this project,” he said. “M&H is the lead firm, but they’re using a number of top shelf consultants to help them.”

Etcher said the county has identified the Highway 19/Interstate 70 corridor has a potential site for the industrial park because it has many advantages such as having access to I-70, Norfolk Southern’s mainline railway and gas pipelines.

“Everything is all I-70 in Montgomery County and ends up on Highway 19,” Etcher said. “There are areas that can be served by access to the highway and interstate system. They can be served by access to the rail. They have access to that robust electricity that comes to that sub-station in New Florence. It’s really the area along I-70, along the railroad tracks and up Highway 19.”