During a detailed tour of Mineral County’s infrastructure and business climate, Mineral County Development Authority President Rick Linthicum announced the name of a prospective tenant interested in moving into the Fort Ashby Business & Technology Park: Pattonair.
A member of the Umeco group of companies, Pattonair is one of the world’s leading providers of distribution and supply-chain management services for the aerospace and defense markets, according to www.pattonair.com.
“Pattonair is a supply chain vendor to ABL and ATK,” said Linthicum. “They are looking to put in a high-tech supply warehouse.”
Linthicum said the international company is targeting the six-year-old multi-tenant building located on Frankfort Drive at the Fort Ashby Business & Technology as a future location.
“Pattonair wants the whole thing,” Linthicum said of the multi-tenant building, which stands 18 feet tall at its eve, is as wide as a full-length football field, and was designed to house three businesses.
“We are still in the preliminary stages.”
By bringing to Mineral County a company like Pattonair, which would employ at least 25 workers, additional jobs would become available as vendors for this company may also relocate to the area, said Linthicum.
The delay on tenants filling both the multi-tenant building and the rest of the available 14 lots in the industrial park is due to several different factors.
“We were without an executive director for six months,” said Linthicum, about the Mineral County Development Authority’s resignation of former executive director Kristen Carter, who left to work in Garrett County.
“Their full time job as an executive director is business retention.”
Currently, the authority has a new Executive Director, Mona Ridder who will take over Carter’s position and will work to improve and increase the business and infrastructure aspects of the county.
Another reason for the industrial park’s lagging economic activity is due to the county not being able to offer necessary incentives to attract prospective businesses to the area.
“We have minimal budget and we don’t have the population,” said Linthicum, speaking of the state’s total population of 1.8 million residents, relatively low compared to neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia. “We don’t have all the money the state of Maryland has to offer incentives. All we can do is offer minimal things.”
The industrial park, lacking natural gas which Linthicum said may be a negative for some businesses, does have all basic amenities - water, sewage, broadband Internet and three-phase electric.
“Three phase electric is very important and is primarily needed for most commercial and industrial entities,” said Linthicum, pointing to a three-phase transformer at the corner of the South End Sports Complex in
Keyser. “Thermogage (a current tenant from Fort Ashby) had to find a place that had three phase electric.”
Originally constructed to attract businesses comprised of 25 employees or more, the industrial park currently houses Thermogage, a small company of just a handful of employees that produces high-tech furnaces sold around the world, and a local excavating company known as J&T Excavating.
“Instead of leaving the state, we retained a local business,” said Linthicum, about Thermogage’s move to the park from Fort Ashby. “I’d love to have large industrial companies in the industrial park, but we can’t attract big businesses without having a lot of things to offer.”
One thing that the Fort Ashby Business and Technology Park does offer is easy access- both by highway and airway.
Surrounded by three State Routes — 46, 956 and 28 — the industrial park is only 10 minutes away from the Greater Cumberland Regional Airport and just 100 miles away from metropolitan airports of Dulles and BWI.
“There is truck traffic already on 956 all the time due to the quarries,”
said Linthicum. “We are 100 miles away from a metropolitan area and there is even a radio device from the Dulles Airport in Fort Ashby. When talking about air, we are not very far and that’s a positive.”
The 27,800-square-foot business and industrial park was purchased by the
Mineral County Development Authority and was financed through the West Virginia Economic Development Office in 1998.
It is located 1 mile west of Fort Ashby on State Route 46.
The authority is currently in negotiations with other tenants but cannot disclose names of prospects.
“These are commercial entities. We don’t want to divulge their names because we don’t want their competition to know what they are doing or where they are locating.”