A Johnston industry plans to expand

SMITHFIELD — As usual, the pending industry announcement has a code name, Project Ace.

And as usual, the county’s industry recruiter can say little in advance of the announcement. “As always, project announcements can be volatile and may evaporate before they get off the ground,” Chris Johnson said in an email before adding, “We are cautiously optimistic with Project Ace.”

Johnson did say the project was a potental game-changer for Johnston County. “We have been fortunate to announce many ‘generational changing’ projects over the years,” he said. “This has the potential to exceed all of these.”

Though Johnson could not be specific, a required public notice in the Johnstonian News does at least narrow the guesswork. It says, “A company proposes to expand existing manufacturing/production facilities in the Johnston County Research and Training Zone” near Clayton.

That’s the industrial area that’s home to Grifols and Novo Nordisk, two of the county’s largest employers. Both drug companies have said they plan to expand their Johnston operations, so perhaps one of them is ready to move forward.

Of the two, Novo Nordisk, maker of the popular drug Ozempic, appears to be the more likely to make an announcement soon. Since last October, a construction company, BE&K Building Group, has obtained 16 building permits for 170 acres of Novo Nordisk-owned land on Powhatan Road, where the drug maker already has two plants.

As other public notices have done, the latest one says what the county will offer to secure new investment and jobs. “The company has proposed the development in Johnston County in exchange for certain economic incentives, including annual cash grants paid from general county funds over a 12-year period,” the notice says. “The cash grants will not exceed the property taxes paid by the company in any given grant year.”

The 12-year time frame is much longer than the typical incentive period for new or expanding industry in Johnston, suggesting, perhaps, that the project could take years to complete and that the investment and job creation could be substantial. As usual, the industry must make the investment and create the jobs before it receives a dime in incentives from taxpayers.

Johnston leaders think the incentives will pay dividends. “The county believes this project will help stimulate the local economy and result in new taxable capital investments in real and personal property and the creation by the company of a substantial number of new, permanent jobs,” the notice states.

But that’s typical too. The county said the same of Do Good Foods, which declared bankruptcy before opening a plant in Selma’s Eastfield Business Park.

County Commissioners will hold a public hearing on the pending industrial incentives at 11 a.m. Monday, June 24, at the courthouse in Smithfield.

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