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American LaFrance switches course on new plant site
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
Back in May, when American LaFrance LLC announced its intention to relocate to 45 acres adjacent to Charleston Southern University, palpable sighs of relief could be heard among company officials.
It appeared to anyone who attended the announcement hosted by the Charleston Regional Development Alliance that the principles involved in the deal were confident a design-build developer would get the 420,000-square-foot assembly plant, corporate headquarters and test track done before the company’s existing plant in Ladson is taken over by DaimlerChrysler AG next year.
Three months later, American LaFrance President and CEO John Stevenson said the company sincerely wanted that $35 million plan to come to fruition.
However, given the strict timeline DaimlerChrysler set for American LaFrance to vacate its current home, an alternate plan was already in the works even as Stevenson, North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey and CSU President Jairy C. Hunter Jr. posed for pictures before renderings of the planned facility.
On Aug. 16, the company announced it had scrapped the announced plan and instead would relocate its existing 420 employees to a site adjacent to the Piggly Wiggly distribution center off Jedburg Road in Berkeley County.
“We had all worked very hard to make the plan with the college a reality, but the bottom line is, if I don’t have a facility well under way by Jan. 1, I don’t have a company,” Stevenson said. “The risks are that high.”
While Stevenson declined to discuss all of the details behind why the initial plan was shelved, he said it basically boiled down to needing certain guarantees from the developer that hadn’t been fulfilled as the groundbreaking on the CSU property approached.
The development group included affiliates of St. Louis-based Clayco Realty Group Inc. and Chicago-based Venture One Properties.
Neither Summey nor Hunter returned calls for comment.
“We’re working on a deadline, and the reality is, we can’t afford to have a single delay,” Stevenson said. “To protect ourselves, we had to take parallel paths … and the developer was well aware of this.”
In fact, the emergency and commercial vehicle manufacturer had seriously considered two alternative sites along Interstate 26 in Berkeley County before deciding the CSU site offered unique educational and community-oriented synergies, Stevenson said.
One of those sites is owned by Dallas-based Hillwood Properties, a firm owned by Texas real estate investor Ross Perot Jr. The other site, the one American LaFrance has now settled on, was owned by Spartanburg-based Johnson Development Associates.
“The new location is just shy of 50 acres, which gives us plenty of room for our vehicle test track and also will allow us to expand in the future,” Stevenson said, adding that talk of expanding is far from premature.
Already this year American LaFrance is about 200% ahead of its forecast in regard to commercial vehicle orders for the year and 135% ahead of its projections for emergency vehicle orders.
“Our orders are growing very, very rapidly,” Stevenson said.
The company is already planning to hire an additional 250 workers in the next two years.
Stevenson said the new site, upon which bulldozers and grading vehicles are already working, has a few advantages over the CSU site.
Because the university didn’t want the manufacturing plant located next to classrooms, the plant was tucked behind the university in the original plan and separated from the corporate headquarters by several dozen acres.
At the new site, the two buildings will stand side by side and be connected by a breezeway, Stevenson said.
“We’ll also be quite a bit closer to our chassis facility, which is located in the Jedburg Industrial Park,” he continued. “We also don’t have to worry about creating a lot of new infrastructure, because our employees, 43 percent of whom live nearby in Summerville, will be able to access the property from Jedburg Road, Old Dairy Road and (Interstate 26).”
But while the land deal fell through, Stevenson said American LaFrance’s commitments to CSU and North Charleston in other respects remain solid.
“The relationships aren’t going to change much,” he explained. “We’re still going to provide scholarships to the children of fallen firefighters and we’re very excited about the prospect of helping them to enhance the curriculum to better prepare students to enter the work force.
“We’re also very committed to the ongoing creation of the new North Charleston/American LaFrance Fire Museum and Educational Center. From the start, we’ve seen the museum as a real testament to Mayor Summey’s efforts and appreciation for our company’s great history. We’ll start transferring vintage fire trucks from our collection to the facility in September, with the museum opening its doors in November.”
Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.
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