Good news in Dayton late last week. Or maybe good news, at least. A “large industrial tenant” may lease space in a former GM manufacturing plant in the nearby suburb of Moraine.
The plant, a 4.2 million square foot monster spanning both sides of Ohio State Rte 741, was purchased a couple of years ago by the Industrial Realty Group, Inc. a California company that owns several other older industrial sites in Dayton.
Moraine officials are, naturally enough, excited by the prospect of a large, new employer in the city. If completed — an issue not entirely settled — the refurbished facility would employ as many as 800 at an average salary between $32,000 and $35,000. That would boost income tax collected by the city by something in the range of $450,000 to $00,000 annually. The figures are from the Dayton Daily News.
This is indeed good news in many respects. A $250 million investment and an additional 800 jobs (more or less) would bring back a good chunk of Dayton's manufacturing legacy.
But, as has become usual for localities and states seeking industrial tenants, bringing the new tenant home will require a substantial public investment. Moraine has filed an application for a grant from Montgomery County to help fund the project. Completing the task will require more, including from JobsOhio, the state’s privately-operated but publicly-funded development arm.
The plant site has had a checkered history. Within living memory, it was used for production of Frigidaire products, production of Chevrolet’s S-10 mini-trucks, and production of GM SUVs. By January, 2007, the facility had produced more than six million vehicles. By the end of December, 2008, it was shuttered.
More recently, over the summer of 2012, five companies leased parts of the plant for manufacturing activities. Cool.
On the other hand, the tenant itself has not yet been named, so no one outside certain circles has a clue as to who’s involved. The aforementioned public investment, while common enough these days, has to be worrisome, especially if the proposed tenant is from, say, China. Not that there is anything wrong with a Chinese company building a plant in the US — Japanese and European companies do that all the time and results have been pretty good — but Chinese companies have shown themselves capable of doing weird things, like abandoning plants built in cooperation with public entities and using public funds. See: http://www.nytimes.com/...
Then there's the matter of pay. Average pay at the facility is expected to be in the range of $32,000 to $35,000 annually, or to put it another way, $16/hour to $17.50/hour for a standard 2,000 hour year. On average. Not poverty wages, by any means, and in a city struggling to right itself in an area often referred to as the Rust Belt since the 1980s, probably okay.
But we still don’t know who the tenant might be or what the plant is expected to produce. The answers will eventually come out, but the only answer given for the public involvement in the project is that the State of Michigan is in the hunt for the tenant, as well.