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Industrial parks brighten 2011 local business prospects

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By Kelly Mori, Staff Writer 5:02 PM Wednesday, December 29, 2010

SPRINGFIELD — Parks, both industrial and traditional, will be a focal point for economic development in 2011, paving the way for new business development and current business expansion.

Groundbreaking for the 211-acre Prime Ohio II Industrial Park, located on Ohio 41, just east of I-70, is slated for this spring and by the end of the year the park will be shovel ready for businesses looking to locate in the coveted I-70/I-75 corridor, said Mike McDorman, president of the Greater Springfield Chamber of Commerce.

Smaller industries will find a new place to locate and expand when the former International Harvester plant on Lagonda Avenue is reintroduced as a light industrial park also in 2011.

The City of Springfield will complete the building demolition and remediation work on the 70-acre site in early 2011, then hand it over for the Community Improvement Corporation to develop it as the Champion City Business Park.

A more traditional park will be completed downtown this year when the Chamber of Commerce brings the Madonna of the Trail to the new National Road Commons downtown park.

The park will add greenspace to a downtown that is undergoing major renovations in the form of the Springfield Regional Medical Center, the renovated Bushnell building and potentially other new construction.

The Chamber also hopes to breathe new life into the NextEdge Industrial Park with a new marketing plan to lure tech-centric businesses to the park east of town.

“There is incredible infrastructure out there for data centers,“ McDorman said. Targets of the marketing plan will include hospital informatics and military-related tech centers.

Additional marketing plans for 2011 will highlight the city’s strengths in manufacturing, banking, insurance and call centers, which are returning to the United States, McDorman said.

“When one of those come to your town, you can be talking about 800 new jobs,” he added

Water mitigation company CodeBlue is expected to move its Springfield operations to the Bushnell building in early 2011 and resume hiring towards its planned 300 employees, said Clark County Commissioner John Detrick.

Also, earlier this month the county commission approved the rezoning of land in Mad River Township for a potential project to bring hundreds of additional jobs to the Enon area.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0347 or kmori@coxohio.com.

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