Gov. Greitens signs Missouri State Penitentiary bill

Gov. Eric Greitens signed a bill Tuesday turning over a portion of the former state prison site to Jefferson City.

Senate Bill 486 transfers about 30 acres of the Missouri State Penitentiary site to the capital city to further redevelopment efforts.

“It can help us to create more jobs with higher pay to attract people to the area,” Greitens said.

The city plans to turn the undeveloped land into a convention center.

The MSP Master Plan, which was started by a special commission more than a decade ago, includes possible hotels and a walkway to a marina on the Missouri River.

“It’ll give the city the opportunity to reach out to some private developers and see what opportunity there is moving forward with ‘What can we do with the land?'” said Diane Gillespie, the executive director of the Jefferson City Convention and Visitors Bureau.

The vacant prison is now a growing attraction for tourists. About 33,000 people toured the historic site in 2016, according to Gillespie.

“We saw so much tragedy that I think that hopefully this will be a new era of enlightenment for the prison,” said Mark Schreiber, a 5th Ward councilman and former deputy warden of the prison.

Schreiber said the City Council still has a lot to do before any work starts on the site.

“We’ll probably have to have a few more work sessions,” Schreiber said. So the MSP Parkway, that will probably be the next thing that we would actually look at doing at some point in time.”

Work on the parkway is already underway. ABC 17 News has reported that the city awarded a contract to an engineering firm last fall to start the design work.

The road will be a joint city-county project and the rest of the project will largely be funded through private developers.