PROPERTY DISCUSSION —The Jefferson Commissioners and members of the Jefferson County Port Authority met Wednesday the Jefferson County Industrial Park to discuss the potential for development.
— Linda Harris
STEUBENVILLE — The way the Jefferson County commissioners see it, a ready-to-develop, 13.36-acre site at the county-owned industrial park is opportunity knocking.
“It’s something I’ve been pushing for quite a while,” Commissioner Dave Maple said. “If you look up and down the Ohio River in our economic development region, there’s not a lot of inventory–inventory means having buildings of a size, whether publicly or privately owned, to get employers into the area. Employers don’t typically want to wait three or four years for something to be built for them, they want it to be built already for them, at least the shell.”
Commissioners and members of the Jefferson County Port Authority braved the cold and rain Wednesday morning to survey the site and talk about the work that’s been done there already, the potential it has to bring jobs and revenue to the community and what it would take to put a spec building on the site.
It was a chance to get everybody thinking about the possibilities, they said.
“I get asked daily, and I see it and I hear it, why are counties around us and areas around us booming with business and we’re lagging behind,” Commissioner Eric Timmons said. “Here’s some shovel-ready land, we’re ready to go … we want to say Jefferson County is open for business, we want you, we want to partner with you — that’s why it’s important to me. I ran on this–I want to see business come to Jefferson County and I want to do what I can to do that.”
The wetlands mitigation –restoration, creation, or enhancement of wetlands to compensate for permitted wetland losses — has already been done, commissioners said.
Under the Clean Water Act, wetlands “may be legally destroyed, but their loss must be compensated for by the restoration, creation or enhancement of other wetlands,” a strategy the U.S. EPA says should result in “no net loss” of wetlands.
To get Ohio EPA’s blessings, commissioners had to purchase wetland mitigation credits from a conservancy land bank, which used it to rebuild a wetland elsewhere in the watershed.
“Wetlands probably put a five-year dent in this specific property, trying to get it remediated,” Maple said. “But it’s all taken care of now.”
Commissioner Tony Morelli admits he’s excited at the prospect of being able to market the property.
“I think it’s a great start,” Morelli said. “One of the reasons I ran was because I was tired of not seeing more economic development here. I was here one week into office and I (participated in) an economic development webinar — the first thing they beat into our heads was if you don’t have any sites, you’re not going to get any businesses. We talk about shovel-ready places but we don’t have any — this would be one.”
Robert Naylor, executive director of the port authority, and board members said they were excited about the possibilities for the area. Naylor said a legal advertisement for a request for quotes for the spec building at the site will be appearing in the newspaper.
The property, they said, should be attractive to businesses.
Morelli said businesses looking to relocate or expand “do not want to hear that we’ll have this ready in a year-and-a-half, they’ll go to other places.”
“You have to have large areas of good, level property to bring in big business,” he added. “I don’t think we’re going to bring in a Toyota plant or anything like that — I think we get the county on track by doing what we did last week, bringing 10 or 15 jobs in, then if we get another business, another 15 or 20 jobs … (it) starts adding up.”
At their Nov. 16 meeting, commissioners inked an agreement with Clean Capital/BQ Energy for a 43-megawatt solar generation facility in Steubenville, guaranteeing “in lieu of taxes” payments totaling at least $300,000 a year for the next 35 years to various city and county entities, including Indian Creek Schools.
Maple concedes developing a spec building won’t be cheap, “(but) if you look at some of the other things we spend that kind of money on, whether it’s infrastructure or whatever, it doesn’t go far when you get into those projects.” And he said economic development professionals say the state is “more open to speculative spending so the grants or the loans or the funding from the state level is more available now than it’s probably ever been.”
He said they’ve already had nibbles from a California company, though he won’t divulge what company it is or what the company is interested in putting at the site.
Timmons said he’s all for moving forward with a spec building.
“With anything there’s a risk, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take,” he said. “We’ve researched it, there are a lot of companies looking for locations like this so we think it’s going to produce and be productive… Let’s get some buildings built and people in these places, that’s what I want.”
Morelli said he’s “excited that we’re all on the same page and want to get something rolling here.”
“When the BDC (Business Development Corp. of the Northern Panhandle) bought the Beech Bottom plant, everybody said they were crazy, who was going to move into it,” Morelli said. “But they bought it, they invested in it … they’ll probably have it full in another year. There’s businesses there right now. I think if we get something going here, it’s just going to domino.”
Maple said that was the point of doing a site visit.
“I think going out and taking a look at it, keeping our movements and momentum going forward (is smart),” he said. “We want people to feel the need for speed, to get things moving.”
Morelli said Jefferson County “has a lot of energy, we (just) need to get something started.”
“I’ve said it a lot of times, I think there’s going to be a domino effect,” he said.
“It doesn’t stop with this,” Timmons agreed. “We have to keep it going.”
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