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TBEIC received ‘real jump’ on incubator development
WARREN
Recent developments elevated the Tech Belt Energy Innovation Center in the local economic-development community, said Dave Nestic, the facility’s chief executive of regional operations.
Last month, BDM Warren Steel Holdings donated the former RG Steel administration building, 999 Pine Ave. SE, to the incubator for startup companies in energy and natural resources.
“It’s a great facility,” said Barb Ewing, a member of TBEIC’s board of directors and chief operating officer of the Youngstown Business Incubator, 241 W. Federal St., in downtown Youngstown. “It should open up great possibilities for them.”
Mayor Doug Franklin said he and the Community Improvement Corp. in Warren worked with BDM Warren Steel through the process, and the regulations to donate the building.
Franklin said it would be great to see jobs coming back to the facility.
“It’s a bonus for our community,” he said.
While BDM Warren Steel still leases some of the building’s space from TBEIC, the rest will be developed for other uses.
“This is expansion space for companies that graduate” from the incubator, Nestic said.
Inside the 56,000-square-foot building are cubicles, cabinets, computers, office equipment and even hard hats left behind after the RG Steel mill closed in 2012.
“We got a lot of copy machines,” Nestic said.
The incubator will do an inventory of the building’s items and slowly liquidate those that are no longer needed. Some of the equipment and furniture could be loaned to tenants at the incubator’s main facility, 125 W. Market St., the former S.S. Kresge Co. store.
Nestic said TBEIC is working with about four to five startups with some of them moving in by next month.
“We’re happy to see the progress made in the past few months,” said Guy Coviello, the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber vice president of government affairs.
The incubator was awarded a $2.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2009 with additional funding from the state.