The CityArchRiver Project made the St. Louis’ beloved Gateway Arch National Park, the Mississippi Riverfront and Kiener Plaza easier and safer for everyone to experience by connecting, invigorating and expanding the park’s grounds and museums. 
Great Rivers Greenway is the proud steward of the taxpayers’ investment in this project through Proposition P, passed in April 2013. We serve as one of six major partners on the project, overseeing the public funds but also actively collaborating on construction, operations and maintenance. One of our primary roles was to break the $380 million project into many different components, so local contractors had opportunities to bid on work. We created and hosted a thorough pre-bid process so that contractors understood the varying ways to bid on projects, especially through federal bureaucracy to bid on contracts posted by the National Park Service. Pre-bid meetings and mixers encouraged local firms to form teams and work together to competitively bid on the work.
Local Contracting: Part of our goal in stewarding the local taxpayers’ investment was to ensure that this major investment went to local contractors. In fact, 158 contracts went to local firms, representing almost 90% of the total value of all contracts.
Minority Participation: Great Rivers Greenway values inclusive construction projects.
To ensure good stewardship, we enlisted the help of an outside firm (KWAME Building Group, Inc.) to monitor and report DBE participation on our redevelopment of the Central Riverfront portion of the Mississippi Greenway near the St. Louis Arch. Workforce hours broken down by trade can be found here, with 14.4% minority and 2.2% female workers on site. Disadvantaged business enterprise (DBE) participation can be found here, with 31.8% of contracts going to MBE and 17.6% of contracts to WBE firms.
Efficacy Consulting tracked workforce participation on Kiener Plaza. Kiener Plaza’s workforce was 25% minority (surpassing 14.7% goal) and 2.9% female (falling short of the 6.9% goal). DBE participation included 33.04% of contracts going to MBE and 2.93% of contracts going to WBE.