Boeing's $1.8 billion project faces questions on tax breaks worth millions

If you spend any time traveling the roads north of Lambert International Airport, you know the landscape doesn’t vary much.

Enormous warehouses and manufacturing facilities are the norm except for about 110 acres nestled between Interstate 170 and the northeastern part of the airport’s property.

This site feels forgotten.

Thick vegetation lines the uneven gravel roads, and trees erupt through leftover concrete and asphalt pads, some rising at least 30 feet high.

In the summer, the insects around generate such a cacophony you could mistake this for the Missouri wilderness until a plane passes overhead.

But this place may soon become more like the rest of the area around Lambert. Boeing Co. has plans to transform it and a nearly 50-acre site to the west into multiple buildings totaling 1 million square feet of new advanced manufacturing space.

The project comes with a $1.8 billion price tag and would add to Boeing’s already sprawling campus nearby.

“This is key to significantly growing our advanced manufacturing capabilities,” Randell Gelzer, Boeing's senior director of state and local government operations, said during a meeting with the Airport Commission last month. “This will allow us to compete for those next franchise programs in St. Louis.”