Wednesday, May 25, 2016
Sixty years ago in this space, The Vindicator heralded the announcement of General Motors Corp.’s plans to build a mammoth automobile assembly plant in Lordstown as “the biggest single industrial boost in the Mahoning Valley’s history.”
Sixty years later and 50 years after the first Chevrolet Impala rolled off the virgin assembly line in Lordstown, that boastful statement still rings true.
Another statement in that Feb. 19, 1956, editorial also has not lost its luster over the span of six decades: “The fact that GM chose the Lordstown site shows that the Youngstown area has advantages which may well attract others.”
Over the years, however, too many of us too easily lost sight of those natural industry-attracting advantages. Among them include a centralized location between New York and Chicago, a rich reservoir of water and natural-gas supplies and a sophisticated and readily accessible network of road and rail infrastructure.
In recent years, leaders in Lordstown have harnessed those and other assets to produce unbridled success. The little village that could has today amassed a trifecta of major new industries totaling about $1.2 billion in investment. It’s created the most-robust economic boom times there since the ribbon was cut on the giant GM Complex in April 1966.
ENERGY CENTER TO SPARK ECONOMY
The Lordstown Energy Center, a $900 million plant to use natural gas to produce electricity, rises as the largest of the three. Now that all of the financing has been finalized, an official public ground - breaking ceremony at the site on Henn Parkway will take place at 1 p.m. June 6.
Throughout its construction phase over the next two years on its 14-acre site, about 500 people in the building trades will enjoy steady and well-paying work. Once complete, the plant will be capable of providing cheaper and cleaner electricity to about 700,000 residences.
Just down the street from the Lordstown Energy Center stands the towering new $100 million, 225,000-square- foot remelt and casting plant operated by Matalco of Ontario, Canada.
Even though it just recently opened and has its official ribbon-cutting set for June 15, it already has orders for its projected total output of 90 million pounds of aluminum billet for all of 2016, the company said. Matalco’s client base includes the building, construction and, conveniently enough, automotive industries.
Similar success also looks likely for a third major development in the village, the Lordstown Logistics Center. This project is most closely linked to the GM plant as its developers hope to attract auto-plant suppliers as tenants in its industrial park with 2 million square feet of building space.
That goal complements those of GM and other automakers in their desire to locate suppliers as close as possible to their production plants in order to minimize transportation costs.
NorthPoint Development of Missouri, which is building the facility, however, is open to other nonauto-industry businesses to move in. When completed and at maximum occupancy, NorthPoint projects as many as 1,500 jobs will be created.
MAYOR’S REMARKS
In an interview Tuesday, Lordstown Mayor Arno Hill, who deserves commendation for his leadership and active engagement in shepherding these and other development projects to fruition, noted that the new ventures generally have few direct ties to the anchor GM plant in the village. “They really have been independent projects,” the mayor said.
Nonetheless, leaders of each of the new developments likely took stock of the village’s half-century record of providing strong reliable services to the mammoth plant and its 4,500 workers as a positive attribute in their inventory of pluses and minuses before setting up shop here. Without a doubt, GM put Lordstown more prominently in the crosshairs of developers.
The village itself clearly has done many things right and stands as a model for attracting development to the Valley.
Other communities should use some of the same strategies such as promoting the region’s natural lures as well as newer incentives that run the gamut from tax abatements to expert development assistance from such groups as the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber.
By doing so, we’re confident the Valley can multiply the success stories of the GM plant, the Lordstown Energy Center, Matalco and the Lordstown Logistics Center many times over.