By Wayne Vardaman

Executive Director, Selma-Dallas County Economic Development Authority

 

The New Year is getting off to a great start at the Selma-Dallas County Economic Development Authority with the announcement of a new company to begin operations in the Craig Industrial Park.

On Feb. 9, the EDA announced that Eovations, a subsidiary of Universal Forest Products, would begin producing building materials in Dallas County by the end of October.

Renovations are scheduled to begin within 45 days and plans are to have sufficient machinery installed to run five manufacturing lines.

The company will initially hire three people as they begin receiving equipment and laying out production lines. By the end of October, they expect to have between 15 and 25 employees. Many of these positions will be production jobs with competitive wages and a full benefit package.

The company plans to invest $7.3 million in building improvements and the purchase of machinery and equipment.

In addition, by the end of 2014 the company intends to increase its capital investment to operate 12 manufacturing lines and employ between 70 and 90 people. This is great news for our community.

The parent company to Eovations is Universal Forest Products, which is headquartered in Grand Rapids, Mich., and has operations throughout North America, employing approximately 5,000 people.

The number of projects we are working on has increased significantly in recent months, leading me to believe we are slowly coming out of the recession. We hope to announce even more jobs in the near future.

Projects we recently worked on range from call centers, to automotive, to aviation, to green energy.

Our existing industry has been our bread and butter over the last three years. Let me remind you, in 2010 Dallas County ranked 12th in the number of new jobs in the state. And all of these jobs were from existing industries.

We continue to build on that progress and look for even more announcements from existing industries.

All of the above activity is helping reduce our unemployment rate. In December we moved out of the top three highest in unemployment with a rate of 13.4 percent.

Together We Work.