Beech-Nut officials call for OK of plan

By KERRY McAVOY, The Leader-Herald
LATHAM — Beech-Nut officials are calling for the Florida Planning Board to give its blessing this week to the site plan for the company’s proposed headquarters and baby-food manufacturing plant.

The Planning Board will meet Thusday in a special session to decide whether Beech-Nut can begin building the proposed 635,000-square-foot facility on Route 5S between the Target Distribution Center and the Mohawk Mills housing development.

Beech-Nut President and Chief Executive Officer Christoph Rudolf said Friday the plans need to be approved soon so the company can start construction in time to prevent delays in its production schedule.

Jim Ivy of the Facility Group, which was hired by Beech-Nut to manage the construction project, said he has cut out all the possible slack in the building schedule to make up for time lost in the permitting process.

Rudolf and Ivy spoke with The Leader-Herald in an interview Friday at Beech-Nut’s temporary headquarters outside Albany.

Ivy said the original plan was to have ground broken by February of this year. Site enclosure was scheduled to happen before Thanksgiving, and company officials had hoped to start production at the site in fall 2009.

Ivy said enclosure of the building is now scheduled for December, but that will only happen if the site plans are approved this month.

“We’ve reached a point now where every day we’re not on site, Beech-Nut may not be able to get their product out next year as planned,” Ivy said.

Ivy said the company could wait until June to break ground, but if it doesn’t get the go-ahead by then, it would have to start looking for an alternative location outside Montgomery County.

He said the company cannot afford a delay in its production schedule, and it is now at the point where speeding up construction might be too costly.

“If cost exceeds the professional output, we’ll need to make some tough decisions,” Ivy said.

Beech-Nut has hit many setbacks in the approval process. A decision was supposed to be made May 5, but Planning Board members said they couldn’t make a decision then because some of the paperwork had been received late.

An error by the town Planning Board in voting to send the site plans to the County Planning Board for review in March meant the plans had to be resent a few weeks later.

In another hiccup, town Planning Board member Herb Faboskay temporarily refused to take part in any Beech-Nut deliberations. At the board’s April 7 meeting, Faboskay said he was angry about a letter from a Beech-Nut attorney that urged local officials to speed up the approval process.

The Planning Board had considered appointing an alternate member to fill in for Faboskay in the Beech-Nut review, but he returned to the Planning Board May 5 and was involved in discussions about the Beech-Nut project. He refused to answer questions from a reporter about his status on the board.

Officials say the approval process has been delayed in part because of the complicated route all the paperwork must travel — from Beech-Nut to the Florida Planning Board’s engineers, to the Planning Board itself, to Beech-Nut engineers, then finally back to Beech-Nut executives. This lengthy process has meant comments, questions and answers have been received late on both sides.

Rudolf said with the company’s fast growth and plans for creating innovative products and packaging, the move to the Florida site is necessary.

He said the company’s sales increased 30 percent from March to April alone. He said new technology in the proposed Florida factory will allow Beech-Nut to continue to grow.

The company said in February it could no longer use its aging Canajoharie facility because of space and infrastructure limitations.

Rudolf said the company is working with the village of Canajoharie to try to recruit a business to occupy that site after Beech-Nut leaves.

Rudolf said the company must first get the Florida facility built before it can focus on selling the Canajoharie plant.

Beech-Nut will close both the Canajoharie plant, which employs 337 people, and a smaller facility in Fort Plain, which has about 15 employees.

The company has already closed its corporate headquarters in St. Louis and relocated about three dozen administrative employees to temporary offices in Latham. Beech-Nut has said its will employ all 389 workers at the Florida facility and hire 135 more.

Rudolf said he hopes the company can stay in the area and help his employees keep their jobs.

“We want to stay in upstate New York,” he said. “This company has a history here, and we want to do this for the community and for our employees.”

Rudolf showed a reporter paperwork saying the company has hired 50 new workers since the announcement of the move last summer.

“We need the support of the local people as well as that of the officials and of Assemblyman [George] Amedore and [State Sen. Hugh] Farley in order to make this run smoothly,” Rudolf said.

He said the company appreciates the 13-year payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement offered through the Montgomery County Industrial Development Agency.

“This helps to make up for doing the project in New York instead of in another, less expensive, state,” Rudolf said.

He would not comment further on the PILOT agreement.

Under the incentive plan worked out by local and state leaders, Beech-Nut would pay $2.5 million to the IDA each year for 13 years. The state would reimburse Beech-Nut for that cost.

The agreement allows Beech-Nut to make the payments to the IDA instead of paying taxes on the property for the first 13 years it occupies the Florida site.

For years 14 through 20, Beech-Nut would pay $60,000 per year to the towns of Amsterdam and Florida. Beech-Nut also would pay $10.2 million to the Greater Amsterdam School District and $6.8 million to the county.

The May 5 town Planning Board meeting was attended by almost 100 union workers. They conducted a rally before the meeting to pressure Beech-Nut to hire local union workers for the construction project.

Union representatives were upset to learn Beech-Nut awarded a steel contract to a non-union North Carolina company, Buckner Steel.

Some Planning Board members have said they will not vote in favor of the project until more local union workers are hired.

Rudolf on Friday declined to comment on the union rally. Ivy said no new work contracts have be awarded since May 5.

The town Planning board will meet Thursday and is expected to vote on the site plan, which will determine whether Beech-Nut can break ground.

Ivy said the company has sent in all of its final papers on the site plan, so the board should be able to make a final decision Thursday.