By Jennifer Jacob Brown

jjacob@themeridianstar.com



After years of standing empty, looking more like a cow pasture than a hub of economic development, Lauderdale County’s I 20/59 industrial park will finally be housing some industry.

Houston, Texas based Handy Hardware Wholesale, Inc. will invest $15 million to $20 million to build a distribution center in the industrial park, creating 150 jobs. Governor Haley Barbour and Handy Hardware CEO Tina Kirbie announced the decision to build the distribution center at the industrial park during a Friday morning news conference.

The state government will put $3.5 million toward the new distribution center using Federal Community Development Block Grants that were awarded to the state because of Hurricane Katrina, Barbour said. He said the local government will contribute $1.5 million to the development.

Ground should be broken on the distribution center in about three months, and with an estimated 12 month construction timeline, hiring is expected to begin a year from now at the earliest, according Skip Scaggs, the manager of business development at the East Mississippi Business Development Corporation.

Land for the industrial park was purchased in 2000, and water and sewer lines were run to it in 2003, Scaggs said. Entities including the EMBDC and local government have been trying to market the industrial park since 2003, and are hoping that Handy Hardware will create a momentum that pulls more businesses to the park.

“It gets the industrial park started,” Barbour said. “We put in the infrastructure… that makes it easier” to bring in more industry.

This will be Handy Hardware’s first distribution center outside of Houston. Handy Hardware is a member-owned company designed to help independent stores take advantage of volume discounts on hardware. It currently has 1,200 member companies in our region.

Handy Hardware’s Houston distribution center employs 450 people, Barbour said, adding, “Perhaps this center (in Meridian) can grow to be the size of Houston, because this one is going to be serving the whole Southeast.” Kirbie did not indicate whether she expected the distribution center to expand. The Houston facility expanded in 2001 from 100,000 square feet to 560,000 square feet, according to the company’s Web site.

Kirbie said her company chose Meridian for several reasons. She said the EMBDC and the Mississippi Development Authority were both “very persuasive” and that a speech on economic development given by Barbour also “reeled us in.” She said the company first began considering Meridian when a computer program indicated that it would be the best location from a logistic standpoint.

Kirbie said the company chose to create a new distribution center because of fuel costs, space issues, and the risk associated with having only one distribution center. She said the company had to stop deliveries for two days when Hurricane Ike damaged the Houston facility, and that another facility would prevent the same problem arising again.

The announcement of new jobs brings a sigh of relief to many during hard economic times in which news of lay offs escalates and news of job opportunities becomes more and more rare.

“We’re not immune to what’s going on in the national and international economy,” Barbour said. He said Mississippi began to feel the hurt of the economy around the end of last year, and that 10,000 of the 26,000 jobs lost in Mississippi last year were lost in December.

“It makes it all the happier when something like this happens,” he said of the new distribution center’s impact on the ailing economy.

Barbour spoke of the economy with a mixture of optimism and caution. “We’ve got to be prudent to keep ourselves in good financial condition,” he said. “The biggest thing that I think we’ve got to do is just keep our attitude right… We don’t need to come back from this recession and just settle for not being last.”