What's up in Wentzville? The Population, Among Other Things

Wentzville’s newest addition is a .

“Now we can put a fence around the city,” said Wentzville Mayor Paul Lambi, noting the city has a , and . “We won’t have to go anywhere outside the city to get anything done.”

As Wentzville's population approaches 30,000 residents, it’s reached a critical mass in which national retailers and restaurant chains sit up and take notice.

Wentzville is Missouri’s fastest growing city, having shot from 6,896 people in 2000 to 29,070 in 2010, according to the U.S. Census. That's a whopping 321 percent increase in the decade.

The growth is increasing Wentzville's homogeneous character: 90 percent of its citizens identified themselves as white in the last census. That's about 15 percent higher than the national figure.

Although the black population doubled from 2000 to 2010, going from 829 to 1,738, black residents now account for less than 6 percent of Wentzville's overall population, a 50-percent drop since 2000. Asians make up about 1 percent of the Wentzville population. They account for 4.4 percent of all Americans.

The Wentzville wave

Forrest and Lorraine Gossett rode the housing wave heading to Wentzville after Forrest’s job at The Boeing Co. transferred him from Wichita, KS to the St. Louis area in 2006. That was Wentzville’s peak year for new residents.

Doing their research, the first things that attracted the Gossetts to Wentzville were housing prices and school districts. They looked at homes in St. Louis County, St. Charles, O’Fallon and Lake Saint Louis--63 homes in five days.

“We got more house for our money in Wentzville,” Forrest said.

The couple bought an 1,800-square-foot home with 700 additional square feet of living space for $220,000, he said. But it wasn’t just price per square foot that brought them to Wentzville.

“We just liked the city,” Forrest said.

“We like the hometown atmosphere,” Lorraine said. “You walk into a store, and everyone says, ‘Hi.’ I grew up in a small town in upstate New York, so I like the small-town feel."

“Usually, if you have a population explosion in a small town, it’s ‘us versus them,’ long-time residents versus newer residents,” she said. “They don’t have that here. We feel welcome.”

Commercial areas have sprouted up around town. The Gossetts do about 80 percent of their shopping in Wentzville, Lorraine said.

 “We’re in a neighborhood that has a real sense of community,” Lorraine said. “And we’re right across from the golf course. Forrest is very happy.”

The city had ample warning that a population boom was heading its way, as it watched as St. Charles, St. Peters and , Lambi said. Officials had time to plan, and that planning is paying off.

“We saw the housing wave coming toward us,” Lambi said. “We built Wentzville Parkway when we were a town of about 2,000 people, and no one was on it.”

“We always tried to project out ahead of the growth,” the mayor continued. “You have to look at least five years out. I remember back in 2002 doing mass transportation studies. They told us then that we’re really building a Ccity that might be 80,000 people.”

Wentzville's growth continued--slow, but steady--through the economic slowdown and housing crunch from 2007 through 2010.

“Our worst year, we had 330 new homes go up,” Lambi said. “A lot of cities would like to see 100 new homes.”

Top grades for schools

The area’s growth is most evident in the Wentzville School District, which has added 500 new students since the beginning of the school year. That’s like adding a large elementary school to the student population in one year.

But that’s down from the 2006 peak, when the district added 900 new students during the year, Matt Deichmann, the district's community relations director, said.

“If you’ve been a teacher in Wentzville schools very long, you’ve gotten good at integrating new students into the mix,” Deichmann said. “This has been going on for more than a decade now.”

In the last 10 years, Wentzville schools grew 121 percent--more than doubling its student population, making it the fastest growing district in Missouri.

Not only does the district include the fastest growing city in the state, the district includes or extends into parts of four of the top 50 fastest growing cities in the state: Dardenne Prairie (No. 3), O’Fallon (No. 22), Foristell (No. 34) and Lake Saint Louis (No. 47).

The Wentzville School District added eight new school buildings in the past decade. The district has Proposition 3 on the April 5 ballot for a $60-million bond issue to build a new high school and add 72 classrooms to elementary and middle schools. Wentzville schools have more students in kindergarten than in any other class.

“We have to have a place to educate the students, and we’re really proud that we’ve done this in a financially responsible way,” Deichmann said.

Even with the tremendous growth, Wentzville has one of the highest performing school districts in the state. In 2010, for the fifth consecutive year, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education designated the district as Performing with Distinction. Deichmann said the district’s composite MAP scores also are in the top 10 percent statewide.

Lorraine Gossett said the school district’s success was a major reason she and Forrest moved to Wentzville, despite the fact that their children are grown.

“We know that our property value will hold up because of the good, quality school district here,” Lorraine said. “We don’t ever want to move--but if we have to, we know we’ll be able to sell our home because the schools will keep our property values up.”

Long commutes

The city isn’t taking continued growth for granted, Lambi said.

Some developers stopped building or went out of business during the economic downturn. Wentzville has a surplus of 3,300 to 3,700 platted lots without homes. That’s about a 10-year supply, if the city continues a pace of 300 to 400 new homes per year.

The biggest challenge to Wentzville’s continued growth is gasoline prices, which have climbed back to more than $3.50 per gallon, Lambi said.

Someone always chides him that Wentzville hasn’t moved any farther away from St. Louis, he said.

“But that’s not how prospective residents see it,” Lambi said.

Rather, they see gas prices as a trade-off for affordable housing prices, he said.

“For every 10 cents gas prices go up, it’s as though we’ve moved 10 miles farther away from the job markets,” he said.

For his part, Forrest said gas prices are a matter of perspective. He drives 38 miles to work each day, but moving to O’Fallon would cut just 10 miles off that commute, he said.

“Gas prices in Europe are about $7 or $8 per gallon,” he said.

Ward 1 Alderman Leon Tow said the City has worked to keep home prices down by examining the municipality’s building codes. The aldermen hope that helps offset gas price worries.

“We want to keep the quality and our goals are the health, safety and welfare of residents,” Tow said, “But if there are items that can be eliminated we just wanted to make sure there weren’t things that were adding to the price of new homes that wasn’t necessary.”

Lambi also said the City has worked on economic development outreach in an attempt to bring jobs closer to the city.

The mayor said he’s focusing on adult education. According to the 2000 Census, 42 percent of Wentzville residents have at least a two-year degree or technical certification beyond high school. He’s working with Graduate America Priority 1 to conduct seminars to educate adult learners on opportunities available in finding financial aid and completing their degrees.

“The goal is to get to a 60-percent attainment rate,” Lambi said. “That would make us very attractive to new businesses and entrepreneurs.”

Traffic tie-ups

Traffic in Wentzville does tend to back up on certain streets, Forrest Gossett said. But it’s nothing compared to sitting in rush hour traffic behind an accident, he said.

“The City has a plan to deal with it,” he said. “So, it’s tolerable. There are going to be growing pains.”

Tow said dealing with traffic is local government’s biggest concern. But heavy traffic or not, Tow said Wentzville will continue to grow.

“It won’t be at a staggering rate, but once the economy turns around, we’ll grow slow,” he said. “I’ve been here 40 years. It can’t be all that bad.”