Real deal: O-I decision took one year
WINDSOR — At 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 16, a dozen members of the news media had gathered in a Greeley office building for a scheduled press conference to hear the official word: Owens-Illinois Inc. was going to build a $110 million glass bottle factory in Windsor.
It was 4:15 p.m. before public officials and O-I executive Ken Lovejoy finally filed into the conference room with the confirmation.
In those final minutes before the press conference, landowners and Owens-Illinois were still putting finishing touches on the deal — a full year in the making — that would plant the bottle manufacturer on a 90-acre farm field on the east side of Windsor.
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Owens-Illinois first showed interest in Northern Colorado in the summer of 2002, when a consultant approached the Greeley-Weld Economic Development Action Partnership.
The consultant said it had a client — still anonymous at that point — searching for an industrial development site of up to 100 acres near railroad tracks.
“At that time the request was for land between Greeley and the Wyoming border,´ said Ron Klaphake, executive director of the Greeley-Weld EDAP.
In early February, Owens-Illinois told Klaphake it was the blind date. What Klaphake didn’t expect was that Owens-Illinois would make its intentions known to the world.
On Feb. 7, ” a couple of days” after Owens-Illinois contacted Klaphake, the company issued a press release to say it was looking to build a plant in Northern Colorado or southeast Wyoming.
“That’s when the phone started ringing,” Klaphake said. “Every contractor between Utah and Texas started calling.”
After an initial screening of potential sites, Owens-Illinois started with a list of nine locations.
By this summer, the company narrowed the candidate sites to two locations ? one near Cheyenne and the eventual selection near Windsor.
The Windsor site came to the attention of Owens-Illinois with the help of Craig Harrison, a Loveland-based land and water broker who also operates an Internet-based mapping service, LandNetUSA. When Harrison fed all of Owens-Illinois’ site requirements into his computer, the ground on Ruth Winder’s 150-acre farm popped up.
“Power, gas, roads and rail were the key,´ said Lovejoy, vice president and manager of facilities engineering for Owens-Illinois. “Where all of those lines crossed is what we call our sweet spot. There was not a lot to choose from.”
Harrison said the Winder farm was not on the market but the timing was right. The family had been shedding its property over recent years.
“It was the last of six or seven farms in her family’s holdings — they were very successful farmers in the Windsor area,” Harrison said. “This one was half owned by a family trust in California and half by Ruth.”
Harrison, who has a history of making land deals in the Windsor area, connected Winder with the owners of the Great Western Railway, which provides short line rail service in Windsor. The Broe Cos., the parent for Great Western, put the Winder farm under contract and became the leading proponent for the Windsor site. Broe would later sell 90 acres to Owens-Illinois.
It was Broe’s grit that apparently saved the deal in the final weeks.
Because of the high water table in the Windsor area, Owens-Illinois grew cautious and nearly turned its back on Weld County. The plant required subterranean construction and Owens-Illinois didn’t want to contend with seeping ground water.
Broe executive Alex Yeros persuaded Owens-Illinois that use of slurry walls — a proven engineering tactic along the Front Range — would protect the plant against ground water encroachment.
At the news conference announcing the Owens-Illinois decision, Lovejoy called Yeros “a bulldog” when the deal seemed in danger.
Furthermore, Gov. Bill Owens got in the act, on one occasion spending 40 minutes with Owens-Illinois representatives, Lovejoy said.
Meanwhile, Klaphake and state economic development officers assembled a package of incentives to compete with the offer they knew would come from Wyoming. In the end, public incentives added up to $4.2 million.
Some of the key components of the incentives package included:
Lovejoy said the incentives duel “washed out pretty closely” between Colorado and Wyoming.
“It’s always nice to have inducements,” he said. “As a company coming to town you get what you can. But at some point there’s only so much the local folks can promise and give away. I think we did pretty well.”
In the end, Northern Colorado’s dealmakers had landed the area’s single-biggest industrial newcomer since the Anheuser-Busch brewery came to Fort Collins in the mid-1980s.
Appropriately, Anheuser-Busch was also the major attraction for Owens-Illinois, which will be making bottles for the Fort Collins brewery.
” I don’t think it’s a sign of things to come,” Klaphake said. “When you have one kind of company — in this case A-B — and you have people who supply that company, then periodically there will be an opportunity.”
In this case, an opportunity found.
WINDSOR — At 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 16, a dozen members of the news media had gathered in a Greeley office building for a scheduled press conference to hear the official word: Owens-Illinois Inc. was going to build a $110 million glass bottle factory in Windsor.
It was 4:15 p.m. before public officials and O-I executive Ken Lovejoy finally filed into the conference room with the confirmation.
In those final minutes before the press conference, landowners and Owens-Illinois were still putting finishing touches on the deal — a full year in the making — that would plant the bottle manufacturer on a…
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