City takes ‘Field of Dreams’ approach to attracting manufacturing
By Jennifer Eisenbart
Staff writer
Luring in new business or unwisely spending city dollars in a speculative venture?
It all depends on how you look at the proposal last week to the City of Burlington Common Council to approve a city request to move forward with building a Class A Industrial building in the Burlington Manufacturing and Office Park.
The council approved moving forward with the project – which started with allowing the city to put out a Request for Proposal, or RFP – which City Administrator Kevin Lahner said was the first step in getting the project started.
“In meetings a couple of months ago, the discussion on economic development led to us talking about how one of the things that sometimes makes it difficult to attract or maintain companies is the lack of Class A industrial space,” said Lahner. He explained that the tag is applied to “high-end industrial space that is as move-in ready as possible for a wide variety of industrial users.”
That could include anyone that makes anything – such as with a speculative building put together by a private developer years ago in the BMOP.
“Anything that is looking to expand,” Lahner said. “There’s all sorts of stuff that’s out there.”
Lahner said the city recently lost U.S. Tanker to the Delavan area because there were no buildings available for them to move into at the manufacturing park. Lahner didn’t say the city would have necessarily kept the company had the building been available, but it might have been a possibly.
The city administrator also said there have been other potential clients through the last few years who have been looking to lease space.
Now the city will send out a letter soliciting proposals to build on the property in the industrial park.
“The way we’ve structured this, we’ve asked the firms to come up with a proposal to build a building,” Lahner said. “It all depends on what they propose.”
He did add that revolving loan funds or TIF funds could be used in “a variety of ways” to help get the project off the ground, “if necessary.”
“It might not be necessary,” Lahner said. He added that since the building would be for a speculative business, there would always be the possibility of it sitting empty.
However, he’s optimistic that something would come up and the building would get used. Most recently, Quad Graphics/HGI had been looking for expanded space. The company decided to build onto its existing structure.
“We feel very strongly it would attract or retain companies,” Lahner said. “That’s why it seems like a good idea to do something like this now.”
In an ideal world, Lahner said the city would have a developer step forward to build the Class A space.
However, once the RFP hits the street, it will be about 30 days before the city will have all responses back. From there, city staff will evaluate the proposals it receives.
“It’ll be a couple of months before we have anything,” Lahner said. “It’s not something that we’ve done before, so it’s a little bit experimental on our part to see what kind of response we get back.
“We’re cautiously optimistic, so we’ll see what happens.”
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