Telegraph Staff Writer
KEYSTONE HEIGHTS— The Clay County Economic Development Corporation president said his organization plans to use a $122,000 state grant to develop sites at the Keystone Heights Airport.
Crawford Powell told the Republican Men of Clay during the club’s June 21 meeting that his organization hopes to attract aviation maintenance and repair operations at the facility because of the industry’s high wages.
“Typically, their employees are in the $75,000, $85,000, $90,000, $125,000 range because of the level of training and expertise,” he said.
Powell added that the economic development corporation hopes to partner with the airport to develop 100 acres and is working with Space Florida to locate projects at the facility.
“What we are trying to do with the bulk of that money is get a lot of (environmental) testing done,” he said, “possibly even getting some land cleared if that’s possible.”
Crawford said businesses looking to move to new sites want as much site preparation done as possible before they commit to a facility.
“The simple thing of getting trees cut and the stumps out, that’s a six-month process right there,” he said. “So, if you can do that beforehand, you expedite the speed to market for a company coming in.”
Gopher tortoises and a filled-in pond
Crawford said speed to market is a critical metric for companies looking to locate to a new area. The three key factors in preparing a site for development are a Level 1 environmental assessment, clearing trees, and zoning.
“On a good day, it’s 90 days,” he said about completing the three critical tasks. “On a bad day, it’s a year, a year-and-a-half, depending on how big that project is and how much land they need. Companies typically don’t want to wait a year-and-a-half to determine if this (project) will work.”
“They don’t want to find out that the site is overpopulated with gopher tortoises, and it’s going to cost them $7,000 a turtle to move every gopher turtle on that property,” he continued. “They don’t want to buy a piece of property and find out there are wetlands through the middle of it.”
Powell said one recent example of an unexpected environmental issue popping up in a project is IKO’s proposed $250 million project near Clay Hill. He said the St. Johns River Water Management District viewed aerial photographs of the site from 1985 and discovered there used to be a pond in the middle of the parcel.
“They looked at the property owner with the aerial on the iPad and said: ‘Hey, where’s this pond that was here?’ The Property owner said: “Well, it wasn’t much of a pond. I filled it in, and my cows graze on it.’ The district said: ‘That pond has got to come back.’ That was six acres of pond right in the footprint of where the buildings were going to go.”
Powell recalled that the property owner purchased mitigation credits to satisfy the water management district, but the ordeal could have crippled the project.
Recent big wins
Powell said that the proposed IKO constructions materials facility west of Clay Hill and the new Niagara water bottling plant in Middleburg could eventually bring over 300 total jobs to the county.
He added that the water bottling plant has already doubled its initial estimate of new jobs. He said Niagara’s 825,000-square-foot building is more than double the company’s original plans.
“It is so big that pilots coming into Cecil now use it as a landmark to know they’re lining up correctly,” he said of the bottling facility. “We have talked to Niagara about painting: ‘Welcome to Clay County’ on the top of their roof up there.”
Powell also emphasized that both enterprises are family-owned and bring high wages with generous benefits. He said that when Niagara needed additional workers after hiring its first wave of employees, it relied on its new hires to recruit more staff.
“After they did their initial hiring where they used the Career Source folks to help them, they have not had to go outside of Niagara employees to get additional people to come to work for them,” he said. “It was like: Hey, we’ve got job openings, tell your buddy, and they (did all the subsequent hiring) internally. They’ve never gone outside after they hired that initial corps of people.”
Powell said the Canada-based IKO would offer average wages of $65,000 annually. He claimed the construction materials manufacturer offers benefits packages that exceed those offered to federal employees.
“This is a generational opportunity.,” he said. “This is a chance where you might have a father and a son, but you could have multiple generations working at an operation like this.”
