Ups and downs for businesses in 2006

ST. LOUIS -- Looking back over the last year's business headlines, it's clear that utility Ameren Corp. got more publicity than it wanted.

Ameren started the year still recovering from the December 2005 collapse of its Taum Sauk reservoir in southeast Missouri. Then the company grabbed national headlines in July when two windstorms knocked out power to more than 600,000 customers. In November, history seemed to repeat itself. An ice storm knocked out power to more than 500,000 customers.

Now Ameren enters the new year with officials in Missouri and Illinois calling for investigations into the reliability of the company's power grid and its response to major outages.

Meanwhile, Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon sued Ameren this month over the Taum Sauk reservoir collapse. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources said it wants the company to pay more than $125 million for damages resulting from the accident.

Both the Taum Sauk collapse and the outages have drawn attention to the way Ameren balances the need for reliability with the demand for profits from Wall Street shareholders.

Nixon said Ameren put profits ahead of safety at the Taum Sauk hydroelectric plant. The company knew there were critical problems at the mountaintop reservoir, but delayed repairs so it could keep the profitable plant running, according to Nixon's suit. Ameren denies that charge.

Tree trimming

The Missouri Public Service Commission found in a report on massive power outages in 2004 that Ameren had cut spending on tree trimming services, which contributed to the outage. The PSC ordered Ameren to boost spending at the time, and the company complied.

In a report on this summer's outages, the PSC recommended Ameren take an even more aggressive approach to tree trimming.

Chief executive Gary Rainwater said tree trimming would not have prevented outages in either storm, but the company was reviewing its policies.

Rainwater acknowledged the outages have drawn a lot of criticism to the company, but said the public debate can be positive.

"We recognize that as a business it's essential that we meet expectations of our customers," Rainwater said.

Wall Street investors haven't seemed overly concerned with Ameren's headaches this year. The company's stock price rose 5.5 percent since the end of 2005.

Rainwater said the company expects to turn a profit this year in spite of the turbulence.

Big profits drove a surge in the biofuels industry across Missouri. New ethanol and biodiesel plants sprung up in small towns across the state, driven by new federal incentives for alternative fuels.

The biofuels boom has been a blessing for farmers like Craig Nelson in northeast Missouri. He joined 399 other soybean farmers to form a co-op that invested $30 million to open the state's largest biodiesel plant in October.

Nelson and others hope the Mexico, Mo., plant will drive up the price of beans they grow.

"For years they had to pretty much give [soy oil] away to get people to take it," Nelson said.

Growth in the biofuels industry is driven by the passage last year of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which set a new standard requiring the United States to use 7 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2012.

Agriculture groups hope the new plants can breathe life back into farming communities hurt by years of low prices. More biofuels plants are slated to go into production this year in Missouri, including a biodiesel plant in Dexter and an ethanol plant in Cape Girardeau.

In Kansas City, the nation's second-biggest movie theater chain is planning to open the curtain on a new act as a publicly traded company.

Marquee Holdings Inc., the parent company of AMC Entertainment Inc., said it planned to file an initial public offering of common stock in the company.

The move comes after AMC bought Loews Cineplex Entertainment Corp. earlier in the year, which added 198 theaters with 2,235 screens. That boosted AMC to a strong second place in the industry with 411 theaters and 5,635 screens in the U.S. and 10 other countries, trailing behind industry leader Regal Entertainment Group.

Kansas City-based H&R Block Inc. is looking for a turnaround this year in the housing market slump. The company's mortgage lending unit, Option One, struggled this year with rising interest rates and an increase in defaulting borrowers.

During the second quarter, the unit saw sales fall 40 percent to $140.6 million and recorded a $39 million loss, compared to a $48.8 million profit during the year-ago period.