43
Final TJX abatement delayed, but company official hoping for March construction
By Ed Runyan
LORDSTOWN
Village council will give a third reading and possibly approve a 10-year, 75-percent enterprise-zone agreement for the TJX/HomeGoods distribution center project at 6 p.m. Wednesday.
The final vote was expected Friday night, but it had to be delayed because of changes HomeGoods asked council to make to the agreement. Making changes required council to go back to second reading Friday, Mayor Arno Hill explained.
The agreement is for a 1.25 million-square-foot warehouse the company wants to build on Ellsworth Bailey Road. The company hopes construction will occur between March 2019 and March 2021.
Council voted 5-0 to amend the agreement with Councilman Ron Radtka abstaining because he is involved in the land deal for the project.
Mark Walker, vice president of real estate for HomeGoods, gave a description of the changes in the agreement and talked about progress the company is making toward a hoped-for start of construction March 1.
“I want to say we are moving along at the greatest of speed to get under construction in March,” he said. “We are well into our engineering plans,” and they have been submitted to the village zoning office.
“We do have an all-hands-on-deck engineering meeting Jan. 15 with your engineers and ours. And we’re hoping to be back in front of the planning and zoning board for site-plan approval as soon as we can get that scheduled,” Walker said.
When asked about a conservation easement the company has said it will establish so a buffer will be created between the warehouse and neighboring properties, Walker said HomeGoods is “going through all of the details we need” to establish it.
The company has talked with the Cleveland-based Western Reserve Land Conservancy and paid $10,000 to cover the conservancy’s legal and other costs. “I’m hoping we will have that taken care of in 60 days,” Walker said.
The goal is for HomeGoods to deed the land over to Trumbull County MetroParks when the easement is complete, he said.
“They [MetroParks] would actually be the owner of the land,” he said. “The county would have no other use for the land other than conservation purposes, so there are safeguards established there.”
HomeGoods also filed a petition Friday with the Lordstown planning and zoning office to create a cul-de-sac on the project site.
As far as changes to the tax-abatement agreement, Walker said one of them gives the company some flexibility in maintaining the number of employees called for in the agreement in the event something causes a large number of its employees to quit their jobs.
The company is projecting it will have 600 full-time employees by the end of 2022, 800 by the end of 2023, and 1,000 by the end of 2024.
“What we’re trying to do is, if for some reason if industry comes in or a major manufacturer restarts operations, we have 10 percent of the workforce resign, go down the street, across the street, elsewhere and fall below the 1,000 jobs, we would have 90 days to say we’re going to fix that,” Walker added.
Meeting the target employee numbers is important because the tax abatement can be terminated if the job numbers don’t meet the targets.
The original agreement called for 1,000 employees to be hired at the plant by 2024, but HomeGoods asked that the wording say “Dec. 31, 2024.”
“We are a company that under promises and over delivers,” Walker said. “This is simply to give us some leeway that we felt we needed to be a little more comfortable that we didn’t disappoint in terms of the completion date.”
He added, “I can tell you we are hoping to be under construction in March of 2019 and to complete the project about two years later.”
If council approves the abatement agreement, it will go to the Trumbull County commissioners, who are expected to approve it.
HomeGoods said in October the abatement is necessary to make the Lordstown site “competitive with other alternative sites being considered.”
The village and schools worked out a revenue-sharing agreement that allows the school district to receive some of the income taxes that ordinarily would have gone to the village. That legislation received a first reading Friday.