Pike County strives to attract business to park

By TOM KANE

MILFORD, PA — Pike County’s principal effort to bring business to the county rests at its corporate park on Route 434 near Lord’s Valley.

The 320-acre park, created by the Pike Industrial Development Corporation (PIDCO), has a wastewater plant in place and 23 developed business lots that are “shovel ready.” The site is 2.8 miles from I-84, a distance considered as a distinct advantage by business developers.

Despite the fact that the park has been in the making for six years, PIDCO finally secured all the required building permits from Blooming Grove Township nine months ago.

“We have one aerospace company based in New York State that is extremely interested in locating in the park,” said Dave Wilson, president and CEO of PIDCO. “We have learned that we are one of two locations that they are considering. We’ll know in a few weeks if they are coming.”

The county commissioners want PIDCO to enlist a particular marketing company to search for businesses interested in moving to a park. The commissioners want the same company to sell the site to a national marketing company that specializes in finding companies that purchase business parks.

“We have had one executive director and a group of volunteers—the PIDCO Board of Directors—doing the marketing of the park,” said Pike County Commissioner Richard Caridi. “That’s not good enough. What we want is a professional marketing group to do the job. It also makes sense to sell the park to a company that runs business parks. ”

The commissioners hire a consultant

“I think that the park will be very attractive to a lot of companies once we get the word out that it is available,” said James Cummings, president of Penn’s Northeast, a regional marketing company in Pittston, PA that the county has hired to find companies for the park. Penn’s Northeast is also attempting to find a buyer for the park.

“We’re looking to attract small manufacturers, back office operations, electronic companies, companies like that,” Cummins said. “We’re not looking for a big distribution center.”

Cummins said his company receives inquiries from companies as far away as Texas and Illinois.

“Companies that are considering moving to a location look for three things,” Cummins said. “First, the cost of labor; second, the availability of a skilled work force; and third, the rightness of the location.”

On the issue of a skilled work force, Cummins said, “If a recognized company will offer a decent wage with good benefits, people will come from all over. Scranton is only 45 minutes away where there are a lot of skilled workers. We have found in our business that even people from New York City will move up here if they think they can make a decent salary.”

Wilson said that the county, which doesn’t own the park but has a stake in its success, is anxious to have PIDCO begin paying off the loans that it received to build the park.

“There’s a state loan of one-and-a-half million dollars from a bank consortium and a half-million-dollar loan from PPL,” Wilson said. The project also received grants of $1.5 million from the state and $1.2 million from an interstate development program.

Problems with getting the park ready

The business park was purchased nine years ago, so why hasn’t it gotten off the ground and contracted with businesses yet?

The answer is that it has taken that long to purchase the property and get the necessary permits from Blooming Grove Township.

Why has is taken that long?

“There were a couple of court cases that delayed it,” said Wilson, who has been on the job for a year. “There were a number of other hold-ups. The former president was already gone for six months before I took over the job.”

“I blame PIDCO for that,” said Levi Travis II, the township’s zoning officer who served on the township’s planning commission for two years. “I was only there for a short time, but my understanding was that PIDCO kept changing things. We would get a set of maps from them and ask questions and they would come back with a different set of maps from the first and no questions answered. That went on for six years.”

Business in Pike is consolidating

“The Pike County Chamber’s principal concern, on the other hand, is to serve existing businesses,” Wilson said. Wilson, the head of the Pike County Chamber of Commerce, is also the director of the Pike County Industrial Authority (IDA).

“We are now at the point of joining all three organizations into a consortium and have them all housed in one location,” he said. Wilson is currently looking to rent office space in or near Milford.

A community of residences needs business

Pike County is the fastest growing county in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

In recently county-released population figures, between 1990 and 2000, the county’s population grew by 65.6 percent, from 27,966 to 46,302 residents. The projected population for 2010 is 60,059.

“A Cost of Community Services Study” completed in February 2005 in Sullivan County, NY reported that for every dollar of taxes coming from residents, it cost towns between $1.21 and $1.58 to provide municipal services. The study also showed that for every dollar raised by taxes from business, it cost only .40 to .57 cents to pay for services to these businesses.

“I think the Sullivan County study is, in the essentials, relevant to Pike County,” Caridi said. “It’s clear that Pike County must attract businesses to counterbalance the growth in residential population.”