Back to web version
KC conference examines business on ‘NAFTA highway’
By RICK ALMThe Kansas City Star
Government officials and business executives from three nations today will wrap up a three-day conference in Kansas City aimed at doing business on the so-called NAFTA highway.
In remarks Friday to 140 people attending from Mexico, Canada and the United States, Mayor Mark Funkhouser said it was no coincidence that the North America Works conference was being held in Kansas City for the third consecutive year.
“Our … location is at the crossroads of North American trade,” Funkhouser said.
Praising the conference’s growing cooperation and influence, Funkhouser said: “Metropolitan areas compete with each other around the world. We can complement each other or we can get run over in the global marketplace.”
Brenda Leipsic, deputy mayor of Winnipeg, Manitoba, in Canada agreed. She cited life-science initiatives in her city that have grown into trilateral partnerships with similar interests in Kansas City and Mexico.
Kansas City and the Texas-based North America’s SuperCorridor Coalition Inc hosted the conference. Those attending included government trade officials and private business interests dependent on rail lines and interstates that form a corridor linking the three nations through Kansas City. The event drew twice the attendance it did last year for discussion of issues from trucking logistics to cargo security.
David Burdick, president of Kansas City-based Priority Logistics Inc., demonstrated a new GPS-based cargo security and tracking system developed by business partners in Mexico that will be introduced next week to U.S. markets.
Among the system’s monitoring features are anti-tampering triggers that activate satellite-based cameras to zoom in and film a vehicle while simultaneously alerting the nearest police agency.
“By the time we’re done it’ll be a public system that everyone can use,” said Burdick, noting shipping companies and cargo owners, and U.S. Customs and Homeland Security agents as users.
A panel discussion Friday outlined plans by Kansas City Southern and its partners redeveloping the long-closed Richards-Gebaur Memorial Airport in south Kansas City as an intermodal shipping center.
The railroad owns track tying the central and southern United States to Mexican deep-water port cities on the Pacific and Gulf coasts, making Kansas City a player in European and Asian shipping routes.
Executives from Kansas City-based Hunt Midwest Enterprises and Illinois-based CenterPoint Properties unveiled plans for more than $500 million worth of first-phase private investment in above- and below-ground warehouse, manufacturing and shipping infrastructure at the 1,300-acre airport site.
Fred Reynolds, CenterPoint senior vice president, said that by this time next year, the first of ultimately 5 million square feet of proposed new structures should be ready for lease.
Carving an estimated 100 acres of underground office and industrial space from solid limestone beneath the airfield “will take a long, long time,” said Hunt President Lee Derrough. While mining operations could begin soon, Derrough said, the first commercial operations underground are probably 10 years away.