Catawba Hits Major Growth Spurt
Published May 27, 2009
Stephen Bollier of Niagara Ventures is bullish on development in Catawba County.
From two new call centers to a Williams-Sonoma offshoot, a major distribution facility and plant expansions, Catawba County’s efforts to create quality jobs are paying off.
Niagara Ventures, a real estate development company, picked Catawba County for its first spec project in the South, 48,000 square feet of Class A industrial space in the Claremont International Business Park.
The shell, which can be expanded to 100,000 square feet, was finished in October 2008; the project could grow to 350,000 square feet.
“What we found is a lot of interest in companies in dealing with smaller towns,” says Stephen Bollier, Niagara’s vice president of real estate. “An educated, manufacturing-based workforce is available. That’s one of the things that drew us there.”
New and existing businesses value the solid workforce in a region about an hour northwest of Charlotte.
An independent study commissioned by the Committee of 100, an advisory group to the Catawba County Economic Development Corp., provided even more ammunition. It found 95 percent of employers rated productivity as good or excellent and nearly half rated availability of skilled workers as good or excellent. One-third of the region’s available workers were willing to change jobs for $14.99 an hour or less; among those unemployed or underemployed, only 4 percent had less than a high school diploma or its equivalent.
That 2007 study was a turning point, says Scott Millar, development corporation president.
“The difference maker was workforce analysis, which reinforced the interviews that potential employers had,” Millar says.
In 2008, a year after the study, Poppelmann Plastics, a German producer of horticulture supplies, announced its second 60,000-square-foot building, also in the Claremont park. The campus is designed to hold nine buildings, and the city is putting in rail lines to accommodate the manufacturer.
Sutter Street, a division of Williams-Sonoma, which also owns Pottery Barn, announced a multiphase project and has already hired 175 people for its furniture-making, distribution and logistics operations that will be in Hickory.
The county saw 1,000 new jobs created in 2008 and commitments for 3,000 by 2012. A new Target distribution center is hiring 450 in 2009 alone.
“We’ve had some good stuff happen,” Millar says.
Turbotec, a Connecticut company that makes tubing for geothermal heat pumps, is locating a new plant in Hickory with 25 jobs to start.
President Sunil Raina says he may relocate much of the company’s operations to North Carolina, citing Connecticut’s high costs.
“We were looking for a ready-made workforce,” Raina says. “The other advantage is for us, most of our customer base is on the East Coast.”
Story by Pamela Coyle
Photo by Ian Curcio
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