Bottomland battle over development brewing in Maryland Heights

Originally published in St. Louis Post Dispatch on May 18, 2011
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by Stephen Deere

MARYLAND HEIGHTS • Amid corn and soy fields sit bulldozers, backhoes and orange barrels to keep traffic off new pavement.

Wind whips through rows of lettuce and scatters freshly dug dirt across the Maryland Heights Expressway near Creve Coeur Lake Memorial Park.

Over the years, the roads through the Howard Bend Levee area have grown wider — the harbinger of developers' dreams to transform some of the last remaining farmland in St. Louis County into another large-scale shopping center.

For those who live and work here in the Missouri River bottoms, a $22.5 million levee completed more than five years ago seemed to make development a foregone conclusion.