Posts by: Economic Development HQ.com

ConAgra Sustainable Development Projects Saved $22M

Last week, Omaha, Nebraska-based ConAgra Foods, Inc., (NYSE: CAG) honored employee teams from their various plants with awards for sustainable development.

ConAgra Foods

ConAgra Foods (photo – conagrafoods.com)

The company apparently received 90 entries for their annual sustainability awards competition.

While only six of them went on to win an award, none of them lost per se, because the projects are collectively responsible for:-

- Creating savings worth $22 million;

- Reducing use of packaging material by three million pounds;

- Conserving 646 million gallons of water;

- Reducing the company’s carbon footprint by 26,700 metric tons; and

- Cutting down on 23,000 tons of landfill waste.

Listed below are the six winning teams and their sustainability projects.

Rensselaer, Indiana – This ConAgra popcorn facility won the award for improved energy efficiency achieved through grassroots engagement by employees. They managed to cut back on electricity consumption by 920,647 kilowatt hours.

Memphis, Tennessee – This ConAgra Wesson Oil facility motivated employees to do their part for water conservation, resulting in employee projects that reduced water consumption by 169 million gallons.

Helm, California – This ConAgra tomato paste facility came up with new technology that separated vines and seeds from the rest of the tomato. Their efforts ended up increasing the fiber obtained from the same amount of produce, while reducing the plant’s waste by 20 percent.

Oakland, California – This ConAgra flour mill successfully introduced a pilot program for new flour bags that reduced packaging material use b 417,000 pounds.

Omaha, Nebraska – This ConAgra Research, Quality and Innovation team simplified the ingredients required for sauces, which reduced inbound transportation and handling needs, and also produced a 23 percent drop in customer complaints.

Kennewick, Washington – This ConAgra Lamb Weston team for agricultural services is working with its potato suppliers to introduce sustainable farming methods. These collaborations between farmers and Lamb Weston accounted for 150,000 acres of sustainable agriculture land use last year.

The six winning teams each gets $5,000 which can be used for a sustainable community development project. ConAgra has been holding this annual internal sustainability competition since 1992.

Gail Tavill, vice president, Sustainable Development, ConAgra Foods, said that these projects reflect an “ongoing evolution of ownership and commitment at every level in the company, further integrating sustainability into how we do business every day.”

Magpul Looking at TX, WY, NE for Relocation from Colorado

Erie, Colorado-based Magpul Industries, a manufacturer of firearms accessories, had last month threatened to relocate out of the state if Colorado passed House Bill 1224, a law banning standard capacity magazines which Magpul makes in Colorado.

Magpul relocation from Colorado

Magpul relocation from Colorado (photo – Magpul Industries)

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper made good on his commitment to gun control by signing three new gun laws last week, including one that bans magazines holding more than 15 rounds.

For its part, Magpul has now announced that it too will make good on its threat to relocate, and said in a Facebook posting that it will manufacture its first PMAGs (holding 30 rounds) outside Colorado within a month.

The company added that they are looking at setting up operations in multiple locations.

“We will likely become a multi-state operation as a result of this move, and not all locations have been selected. We have made some initial contacts and evaluated a list of new potential locations for additional manufacturing and the new company headquarters, and we will begin talks with various state representatives in earnest if the Governor indeed signs this legislation.”

The company’s COO Doug Smith is reportedly planning on meeting with economic development officials from Texas, Wyoming and Nebraska.

Magpul has 200 employees in Colorado, and claims that it contributes $85 million to the state economy. They also claim to support another 400 jobs in their supply chain.

“We could choose to stay in a state that wants our jobs and revenue, but not our products, and lose half the jobs we are fighting to save, or potentially the entire business, when our customers stop buying,” said COO Smith. “Or, we can take the company and those 600 jobs out of Colorado to continue our growth and the growth of American manufacturing in a state that shares our values. This is not really a choice.”

Some of these suppliers have indeed confirmed that they too will follow Magpul to its new location. One of them is Denver-based Lawrence Tool & Molding, which gets more than half of its business from Magpul, and has confirmed that it will also move out of Colorado if Magpul does. Lawrence Tool & Molding has 82 employees in the state.

“It is heartbreaking to me, my employees, and their families, to think that we will be forced to leave,” said Richard Fitzpatrick, founder, president, and CEO of Magpul Industries.

Former GM Plant in Kansas City to Become Industrial Park With 2000 Jobs

The Unified Government Board of Commissioners of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, has approved a development agreement with NorthPoint Development to create the Central Industrial Park on the site of a former General Motors plant.

Central Industrial Park, Kansas City

Central Industrial Park, Kansas City (photo – beyondthecontract.com)

The conversion of the 80-acre auto assembly plant site in the Faixfax Industrial District will require a capital investment of $40 million, and the project will create 2,000 new jobs.

The property is currently owned by the RACER (Revitalizing Auto Communities Environmental Response) Trust, which was set up expressly after the GM bankruptcy to get 89 former GM sites in 14 states cleaned up and sold for redevelopment in a way that would benefit the communities the sites were in.

RACER had recently finalized a purchase agreement for the Fairfax site with NorthPoint, subject to Northpoint getting approval for development by the board of commissioners.

RACER Trustee Elliott P. Laws said that the plan for an industrial park was a strong commitment to the community by Northpoint

“I congratulate NorthPoint, the Unified Government and the people of the Kansas City metropolitan area who ultimately will benefit from the jobs and other economic opportunities created by this investment,” added Laws.

Kansas City Mayor/CEO Joe Reardon said the huge number of jobs created by the RACER project, which is close to GM’s current plant in the city, is a testament to “what can be achieved through private and public partnerships that help grow our local economy.”

The proximity to GM’s current plant makes the industrial park ideal for GM’s automotive suppliers.

The complete development will take between six years to a decade, and the park will support at least three and at most eight manufacturing facilities. The projected 2,000 jobs at full capacity stand true regardless of how many tenants take up space.

Northpoint COO Chad Meyer said they were thrilled to be part of a project where a brownfield site was being redeveloped into an industrial park. Meyer said Northpoint will get started with the construction on the site later this year, and expects the first tenants to move in and begin operations next year in the fall.

They will be eligible for local tax incentives including industrial revenue bonds only after making the necessary infrastructure improvement investments for roads, water supply and utility lines to service the industrial park, in addition to reaching a threshold on above-ground construction.

Fort Collins, CO Secures Woodward HQ With $23.5M Incentives

The City Council of Fort Collins, Colorado has preliminarily approved a $23.5 million incentives package to prevent Woodward Inc. (NASDAQ: WWD) from moving out.

Woodward

Photo – Woodward.com

Woodward will be relocating 600 jobs from its other facilities to Fort Collins, and creating another 400 new jobs with average annual wages of $76,000.

This is on top of the 700 existing Woodward jobs that were retained and would have otherwise been moved elsewhere.

Not to mention more than 1,650 construction jobs to build the planned four-phase construction of 944,000 square feet of manufacturing facilities along with office space and retail outlets.

Woodward plans to invest $169 million for the construction and another $50.5 million for equipment.

The company had just moved out of Rockford, Illinois and relocated to Fort Collins in 2007, and made it known last year that it was looking for a new headquarters again. They also claimed to be looking at some 20 sites across the map for the relocation.

One of these 20 sites was in Fort Collins – the Link-N-Greens golf course.  Woodward showed its interest in the 101 acre site in Jan 2013 by providing the city with extensive documentation on its proposed new headquarter plans for the site.

The city moved quickly on it, with the zoning board approving Woodward’s proposal in February. They asked for and got an economic impact study that was prepared by an Austin-based company. The study showed Fort Collins would lose $28.8 million in a decade if Woodward moved out.

The incentives package includes an 80 percent rebate on the expected $4.7 use tax for equipment and construction material, another $2.7 million rebate for capital expansion, and waiver of $300,000 out of the development fee.

The city has also agreed to bear the millions of dollars it will take to move power lines running through the golf course, and also the cost of relocating the Poudre River Trail. Woodward, for its part, will purchase the site next month and give back the city 29 acres for use as open space.

Woodward Inc. manufactures control systems used in the energy and aerospace sectors. It has plants and facilities in 14 countries, including 11 locations in the United States.

International Scientists Redefine Sustainable Development Goals

One of the main outcomes at Rio+20 was that members states agreed to get started on coming up with a set of new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) expiring in 2015.

This process to develop the SDGs just got kick-started with a paper published in Nature journal by a group of scientists attending a UN conference in New York on the same subject.

The paper, titled “Sustainable development goals for people and planet” has 10 co-authors including lead author Prof. David Griggs, director of the Monash Sustainability Institute; and Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Center.

A keynote presentation on the paper was made at the UN conference by Prof. Griggs. The authors claim the established way of looking at sustainable development in terms of the three pillars of economic, environmental and social gains is outdated and flawed for today’s reality.

“We argue that it is more beneficial, and indeed necessary, to think of these pillars as concentric circles – economy within society within the environment,” said Prof. Griggs.

SDGs redefined

SDGs redefined (photo – stockholmresilience.org)

The six new SDGs they propose are:-

1. Thriving lives and livelihoods;

2. Sustainable food security;

3. Secure sustainable water;

4. Universal clean energy;

5. Healthy and productive ecosystems; and

6. Governance for sustainable societies.

They say while the MDGs have helped in some ways (such as halving the number of people living on less than a dollar per day), they are not going to be so useful going forward due to inherent conflicts.

For example, economic progress is made without regard to its environmental impact, while measures to safeguard the environment are opposed as detrimental to the economy.

The twin goals behind the six new SDGs outlined in the paper are to eradicate poverty and keep intact the planet’s life-support system, while eliminating the aforementioned conflicts between the MDGs.

Dr. Mark Stafford Smith, one of the co-authors of the paper and science director of CSIRO’s climate adaptation research program in Australia, said that the SDGs they have proposed have the potential to help the world transition to a sustainable lifestyle while safeguarding all the human development gains achieved in the last 20 years.

Macy’s Plans $35M Expansion of Goodyear, AZ Distribution Center

Macy’s, Inc. (NYSE:M) announced plans to expand its Goodyear, Arizona distribution center for online orders.

Macy's Fulfillment Center in Goodyear, AZ

Macy’s Fulfillment Center in Goodyear, AZ (photo – ci.goodyear.az.us)

The expansion will require a capital investment of $35 million, and is expected to create 125 new full-time jobs.

The expansion project involves adding 360,000 square feet of space to the existing 600,000-square-foot facility which was opened by Macy’s in 2008.

Goodyear Mayor Georgia Lord said she was thrilled by Macy’s selection of Goodyear for the expansion.

“Macy’s has been a great corporate citizen, community partner and major employer these past five years,” added Mayor Lord. “Macy’s is one of our most critical corporate anchors. Their expansion demonstrates Goodyear is continuing to grow and we’re ready for businesses to grow with us.”

The Goodyear fulfillment center for online orders placed on Macys.com is one of three such Macy’s distribution centers. The other two are in Portland, Tennessee and Martinsburg, West Virginia.

Another fulfillment center in Cheshire, Connecticut fulfills orders placed on Bloomingdales.com. Macy’s also has a network of 20 traditional distribution centers for fulfilling orders placed by physical stores.

The online order distribution centers are much more beneficial to the community they are in because of the relatively huge number of jobs created. A lot of manpower is needed to pack and ship the vast number of single item orders, as compared to the easier job of packing and sending a limited number of large orders placed by stores.

The Goodyear fulfillment center already has 500 full time Macy’s associates, and this will go up to 625 will the creation of 125 new jobs. This count does not include seasonal jobs for the holiday season.

Macy’s has an “omni-channel strategy” for the four fulfillment centers mentioned above. These centers are capable of handling orders seamlessly for customers shopping in stores, online and via mobile devices.

“Our online fulfillment centers, as well as the 500 Macy’s stores that will be equipped to fulfill orders by the end of 2013, handle customer orders placed online, as well as ship products to customers who shop in stores that may not stock the specific product they need. Through our omnichannel strategy, we can access the total inventory of our company for every customer,” said R.B. Harrison, Macy’s, Inc.’s chief omnichannel officer.

Apart from this state-of-the-art omnichannel capability, the Macy’s distribution center in Arizona is also known for housing one of the largest solar array installations in the nation on its roof.  The 3.5 megawatt solar energy system provides 70 percent of the building’s energy needs, and offsets an annual 3,500 tons of Co2 emissions.

Actavis Expands Manufacturing Facility in Broward County, FL

Actavis, Inc. (NYSE: ACT) announced expansion plans for its pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Davie, Broward County, Florida.

Actavis

Actavis (photo – actavis.com)

The expansion project calls for an investment of $40.5 million by Actavis, and will create 220 new jobs.

The company plans to expand its warehousing operations at the Davie site by 13,000 square feet, and will be expanding the manufacturing operations by another 16,700 square feet.

The Town of Davie was assisted in securing the expansion by the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance (GFLA) and Enterprise Florida Inc.

Davie Mayor Judy Paul said Actavis had a vital part of the community and they were happy to work with the company for their expansion. Bob Swindell, president and CEO of GFLA, expanded on that by talking about Actavis as one of the leading employers in Broward County.

Swindell added that the expansion was an indication that their efforts aimed at growing the “strong South Florida life sciences cluster continues to pay off.”

That, and the fact that Actavis was awarded a total of $2.81 million in state and local incentives. This includes $1.1 million under the Qualified Target Industries (QTI) program, with 20 percent coming from Davie and the remaining 80 percent from the state as matching funds.

In addition to the QTI tax refunds, Davie is separately providing $440,000 and the State of Florida is chipping in with another $690,000. Actavis has also been approved for $584,500 as a training grant.

Paul Bisaro, president and CEO of Actavis, Inc., said the company was honored to have such support for its expansion from the Governor’s Office, Enterprise Florida and locally from town officials in Davie.

Bisaro hinted that this kind of support would help them expand in other Florida locations. Actavis currently has 1,400 employees in Florida, with additional facilities in Sunrise and Weston. They have a packaging and distribution facility in Sunrise. Weston has the company’s R&D operations and their huge Anda, Inc. distribution division.

The Davie manufacturing facility, which produces 2.2 billion units annually, has been operational since 1992, but only came under Actavis management in 2006.

Parsippany, New Jersey-based Actavis, Inc. was known as Watson Pharmaceuticals Inc. until January 2013, and changed its name to reflect its acquisition of Actavis Group last year. Their global headquarters is in Zug, Switzerland.

The company is the world’s third largest prescription drug maker, and generated revenues of $ 5.9 billion last year. They have 17,000 employees around the world in 30 manufacturing plants and 17 R&D facilities, in addition to other distribution and sales offices.

Knoxville Gets TVA’s First Metro Data Center Site Designation

The Tennessee Valley Authority had brought in Deloitte Consulting for a site assessment study to seek out and evaluate data center site locations throughout the TVA service area, which covers seven states.

TVAsites.com

Photo – TVAsites.com

Deloitte came up with 20 sites, with a site in the Corridor Park in the City of Knoxville, TN identified as the TVA’s first metro area data center site.

“Having this site identified as a primary data center location gives the Knox County area an advantage in the highly competitive site selection process,” said John Bradley, TVA senior vice president for Economic Development. “We are glad to work with the Knoxville Chamber, local utilities and other community, state and regional leaders to actively market these sites to companies as part of our global economic development recruitment efforts.”

To order to be classified as a metro data center site, Deloitte required a threshold of 10 available acres with fiber optic connectivity from multiple carriers and a power capacity of at least five megawatts.  Both of these requirements are essential for data center projects.

The 10.6 acre Knoxville site priced at almost $2 million is the only one marked “primary ready for development” out of the 20 sites identified by Deloitte. The telecom infrastructure is more than adequate, and it has a reliable electricity supply.

The site on lots 21 and 23 in Corridor Park is in West Knox County, located close to I-40, I-75 and I-140. Power can be provided for a project from three sub-stations.  Any company which sets up a data center here will join companies such as CSL Plasma and Siemens Molecular Imaging.

Doug Lawyer, vice president of economic development for the Knoxville Chamber, said the designation will be a valuable tool and he looks forward to “touting the advantages of the Knoxville site” to high wage prospective data center end users.

You can see the full list of all 20 data center sites identified by Deloitte on the tvasites.com website, one of the largest GIS-based searchable databases for site selectors, which includes categorized economic development sites and buildings covering 80,000 square miles across seven states.

The TVA classifies data centers as a targeted industry on its tvaed.com website.

Apart from the long-haul fiber optic, reliable power and easy access to the interstates, TVA cites the other positives for data center projects – abundance of water supply, 83 Tennessee Valley colleges and universities, and a low possibility of a natural disaster.

Deutsche Bank Gets $1.94M Incentives for Jacksonville, FL Expansion

The City of Jacksonville, Florida has put together a $1.94 million state and local incentives package to secure an expansion project by Deutsche Bank.

Jacksonville, FL

Jacksonville, FL (photo – coj.net)

As per the economic development agreement, Deutsche Bank will invest $10 million and create 300 new jobs by 2016. Deutsche Bank already has 1,349 employees in Jacksonville.

The new jobs will have average annual wages of $62,063, which is 150 percent more than the state’s average annual wage for the private sector.

The agreement, executed between the City and DB Services New Jersey Inc., DB Services Americas, Inc., and Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc. calls for the expansion project to be approved as a QTI (qualified target industry) business. These are the American subsidiaries of the parent company – Germany-based Deutsche Bank.

As QTI business, Deutsche Bank will be approved for with QTI tax refunds to the tune of $360,000. The State of Florida will chip in with $1,440,000 in matching funds. The total QTI Refunds worth $1.8 million for 300 jobs means that Deutsche Bank is getting a $6,000 grant for creating each new job.

The City of Jacksonville is additionally offering Deutsche Bank a $140,000 REV (recapture enhanced value) grant that will be paid out in annual installments over a five year period. This puts the city’s local incentives package offering at $500,000.

This latest expansion by Deutsche Bank comes right on the heels of the completion of a previous $10 million expansion of their Southside campus in Dec 2012 which added 30,000 square feet and 260 new jobs at average annual wages of $52,722, which works out to an additional payroll of $18 million.

For this previous expansion, Jacksonville provided Deutsche Bank with a similar incentives package worth $5,000 per job. This included a $145,000 REV grant and another $260,000 as 20 percent of the QTI Refunds, with the remaining 80 percent provided by the state as matching funds.

At that time, Jacksonville Mayor Alvin Brown said that the Deutsche Bank expansion was part of a hopeful trend towards better days. “Jacksonville is open for business. Unemployment is falling. We’re cutting ribbons. Jobs are coming back – but these aren’t just jobs. They are good-paying career opportunities. And they have the potential to make a serious impact,” added Mayor Brown.

Medient Plans $90M Studio in Effingham, GA

Medient Studios, Inc. (MDNT:OTC BB) and the Effingham County Industrial Development Authority (IDA) in Georgia have signed an MOU to develop what is billed to be the largest movie studio yet in America.

Medient's Manu Kumaran at Effingham IDA meeting

Medient’s Manu Kumaran at Effingham IDA meeting (photo – Effingham Chamber)

The company announced that it will invest more than $90 million to develop a 1,500-acre lot along I-16 into a campus that will include the studio and other facilities.

Apart from the movie studios, the site will include capability for video game production. It will also have restaurants, shopping, a hotel, golf course, amphitheater and botanical gardens.

With the help of all this, the company hopes to turn the site into a tourist attraction.

The IDA is helping out with $1.25 million for developing the site, and is also entering into a 20-year capital lease agreement with the company. In return, Medient has agreed to invest $90 million and create at least 1,000 new jobs over the next five years.

The movie studio alone would need 400 employees, with the video game production facility requiring another 200 employees. All told, the company expects to employ more than 1,200 employees by the time they complete the first phase of the development.

John Henry, CEO of the Effingham IDA, said that the project was potentially a game-changer for the region and its benefits will have an impact over the long term.

The plan also calls for the project to be made environment-friendly and sustainable with the deployment of hydro and solar technologies.

“We are confident that this exciting project will become a prototype of environmentally sustainable construction, management and living while also promoting a public/private partnership for the region and for the state,” said Manu Kumaran, chairman and CEO of Medient.

The IDA has been working on this project for a year, and Effingham not only won out over Atlanta and Savannah, but also out of state sites in Pennsylvania and New York that were under consideration.

Kumaran praised the Effingham IDA for getting the deal done in a “professional and efficient manner.” He also cited the pleasant weather in Effingham as one of the factors that helped them make the decision.

The Los Angeles, California-based Medient has so far produced 14 movies, and the new Georgia facility will be their first own movie studio.

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