Thom Hart leaving

Thom Hart is leaving the Quad Cities to take a job with the state of Iowa. It is a shame that he is not sticking around to see how accurate his predicitions about the benefits the proposed Triumph pork processing plant in rural East Moline would bring to the Quad Cities turn out to be. To refresh your memory he said:

In a news conference this afternoon announcing details of the proposed plant along Barstow Road, Quad-City Economic Development Group President Thom Hart recalled a decades-old effort to create access to 53rd Street from Interstate 74 in Iowa.

“The only thing we did wrong then was we underestimated,” he said of the resulting growth along the corridor.

Hart said that Triumph Foods’ new plant in St. Joseph, Mo., already is showing signs of new development related to the plant, which is not scheduled to open until after the first of the year. He said a truck wash already has “popped up” on land adjacent to the plant.

He expects additional developments, such as a strip mall and bank branch, to follow the construction in East Moline. He also expects as many as 3,000 new jobs to spin off the 1,000 that are created about a year after the plant opens.

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I was skeptical about his vision of development arising around a pork processing in rural Rock Island County similar to the development we see in the 53rd St. corridor in Davenport. Perhaps he will return in a few years to assess the accuracy of his prediction.