That new hotel targeted for New Albany will be a Hampton Inn & Suites, Crestpoint Cos. CEO Kal Patel tells me.

Cincinnati-based Crestpoint is working on the project with joint-venture partner LinGate Hospitality of Owensboro, Ky. They’re planning a 114-room, limited-service Hampton Inn that will include 31 suites, meeting capacity for 40, a fitness room and indoor pool.

Patel said Crestpoint and LinGate first looked into the opportunity for a hotel in New Albany in 2009 and put the 2.4 acres in contract last year, paying cash. Their Woodcrest New Albany LP bought the land from Smith Mill Ventures LLC, a joint venture between the New Albany Company Ltd. master land developer and Columbus developer Larry Canini. Construction is expected to begin in spring of 2014 with an early 2015 opening targeted. The developers are seeking construction bids.

The hotel developers earlier this year opened a Holiday Inn Express north of Morse Road adjacent to the Easton mixed-use development

-Brian R. Ball, Columbus Business First

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NEW ALBANY — The business boom on Beech Road at the western edge of Licking County just keeps on going, with two more companies joining the development party.

Exhibitpro, which sells custom and modular trade show exhibits, will on Dec. 1 move its headquarters and about 25 employees from the Polaris shopping area in northern Columbus to Licking County.

The company recently started construction on a 54,000-square-foot building to house an office, warehouse and showroom in the Personal Care and Beauty Campus of the New Albany Business Park.

Magnanni, an international company from Spain that sells shoes to high-end retailers, will break ground next month on a 15,000-square-foot warehouse in the beauty campus. It will have 12 employees.

“We couldn’t be happier with the success we’re having in the beauty park, with companies from outside of the state of Ohio and international companies all in the park,” said Bill Ebbing, president of the New Albany Co.

Beech Road, a narrow, rural road before work began to widen and relocate Ohio 161, will soon have 11 companies employing 1,500 people and using 1.2 million square feet of space.

Better than Polaris
Greg Lindsey, the Exhibitpro director of operations and business development, said the business campus in Licking County will be an improvement on the Polaris location.

“From our perspective, we had an opportunity to look at multiple (sites),” Lindsey said. “It took awhile to find the right fit and right space.

“When you look at the New Albany Business Park, it’s built in a way everything is parallel to 161, expansion east to west and not north to south, easy access to 161. You can’t say that about Polaris.”

Lindsey, a 1984 Northridge High School graduate who lives in New Albany, likes the teamwork atmosphere of the companies in the beauty campus.

“It allowed us to get involved in an area with high synergy about it, that fraternal feel,” Lindsey said. “I’ve lived in New Albany almost 10 years and people in New Albany like to do business with people in New Albany.”

The 21-year-old exhibit production company will no longer battle the Polaris congestion, said Exhibitpro President Ed Miller.

“We offer exhibit management, so we store the property and travel with clients and set them up across the country,” Miller said. “We ship a lot around the country on a daily basis, so having good access was a part of the plan.”

The building will be at 8900 Smith’s Mill Road North, across the street from Axium and the first building outside the campus’ one-mile loop.

‘Right investment, safest investment’
Paul Roehrenbeck, chief financial officer of Magnanni Inc., said the business park is the best place to relocate the company’s U.S. headquarters.

It has outgrown its current home, also in New Albany.

“New Albany is doing things very well,” Roehrenbeck said. “It’s a planned community. We looked at options of buying existing buildings, but with the place here, we felt it was the right investment, the safest investment.”

Roehrenbeck, who has lived in Johnstown since 2001, said the company has an option for future expansion which could double the size of the building. The facility will open in March or April.

“It’s important to focus on growth and development they have going on here,” Roehrenbeck said. “Obviously, we do have quite a bit coming in and going out. It is convenient, an area easy to get on and off.”

The third-generation family-owned company produces its shoes in Spain and sells wholesale to stores such as Nordstrom.

The shoes retail for $300 to $500, and its customers live in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Dallas, he said.

New Albany Co. plans
Ebbing said the business park has made a commitment to planned growth, which means adding companies without creating congestion.

“The whole business park is served by three interchanges,” Ebbing said. “There’s many ways to get in and out.

“What’s great about New Albany and our master plan is we’ve taken all that into account, building infrastructure to minimize those (traffic problems).”

Ebbing spoke Thursday at the New Albany Chamber of Commerce community update breakfast at Winding Hollow golf course.

He declined to comment on the possibility of the Outlet Shoppes at Columbus coming to the Ohio 161-Beech Road area, as shown on the Horizon Group Properties website.

Ebbing did say a restaurant would be nice in the area to serve employees of the business park.

“We’re constantly looking at many kinds of uses that help support the office development, the light manufacturing and production taking place at the Beech Road interchange.

“One of the things the city has done has been forward thinking with their infrastructure. Roads, utilities done to accommodate all future growth.”

The entire New Albany Business Park consists of four business clusters, or innovation campuses. They are: information and technology; corporate office; health care; and personal care and beauty.

Each campus was developed for businesses with complementary capabilities, common supply chain contractors or similar energy and security concerns, according to the real estate development company founded in 1991 by Les Wexner and Jack Kessler.

Just west of the beauty campus, in Franklin County, construction continues on the Bob Evans company headquarters, which Ebbing said will open next month with 500 employees new to the community.

“We tend to take things for granted,” Ebbing said. “It’s easy to become complacent. We need to challenge ourselves to become even better. What impresses me most about our community is how our community understands this.”

kmallett@newark | advocate.com
740-328-8545 | Twitter: @kmallett1958

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By LORI WINCE, This Week Community News

Many of New Albany’s businesses exceeded their requirements for creation of new jobs in 2012, according to Jennifer Chrysler, the city’s community development director.

“Our businesses in the Oak Grove and Central College business campuses have exceeded their projections in every case except for TJX and Motorists (Insurance), which are still in compliance,” Chrysler told New Albany City Council on July 2.

“The actual jobs created are far above (projections),” said City Councilman Stephen Pleasnick.

Chrysler said the Franklin County Tax Incentive Review Council annually reviews revenue and employment projects for companies that receive tax incentives. Tax abatements allow businesses to pay a portion of their real estate taxes for a period of time in exchange for increased revenues and job creation.

The council’s chairman is Franklin County Auditor Clarence Mingo. Members include New Albany city officials and representatives of New Albany boards and commissions, Plain Township and the New Albany-Plain Local School District.

The review council reviewed tax abatement agreements last month and New Albany City Council on July 2 accepted the findings in a 5-0 vote, with Chip Fellows and Chris Wolfe absent.

Chrysler’s report said Abercrombie and Fitch and Discover Financial Services greatly exceeded the projected job creation.

The Abercrombie and Fitch site off Smith’s Mill Road has a 15-year, 100 percent tax abatement. The company was expected to create 1,200 jobs and now has 2,766 employees.

Discover Financial Services on Central College Road receives a 15-year, 100 percent tax abatement. It has created 1,809 jobs — 309 more than expected — and exceeded its annual payroll by $37 million.

Chrysler said tax-abatement agreements use different benchmarks, including job creation, income taxes generated or annual payroll figures.

Many of the other businesses in New Albany have exceeded income-tax predictions or estimated annual payroll, Chrysler’s report said.

The Smith’s Mill office park on Smith’s Mill Road contains five, 8,000-square-foot buildings which receive a 10-year, 100 percent tax abatement. It has exceeded annual income-tax generation by $20,667.

The two medical office buildings on Smith’s Mill Road receive different abatements. The Mount Carmel New Albany Surgical Hospital receives a 10-year, 100 percent tax abatement and the second building receives a 12-year, 100 percent tax abatement. Together, the two buildings have created 273 new jobs and exceeded target revenue for income tax by $192,654.

Commercial Vehicle Group on Walton Parkway receives a 12-year, 100 percent tax abatement. It has exceeded the estimated annual payroll by $11.15 million.

The Water’s Edge office building on Walton Parkway receives a 15-year, 100 percent tax abatement. Businesses within the building have created 253 jobs and exceeded the estimated payroll by $9 million.

Motorists Insurance on New Albany Road East receives a 10-year, 75 percent tax abatement and TJX on New Albany Road East receives a 15-year, 65 percent tax abatement. Chrysler said both are within guidelines for the abatements though neither has reached total job creation or payroll projections. The city allows a three-year period for new companies to meet the benchmarks in the abatement agreement.

Smith’s Mill ventures, which includes the Tutor Time Learning Center, was expected to generate $18,557 in income taxes. Because the company did not meet that target and created only $4,633 in income taxes, it had to make a payment to meet the benchmark, according to Chrysler’s report.

Chrysler said the businesses in the Licking County portion of the city’s business parks, most of which are new, also are meeting abatement benchmarks.

American Electric Power on Smith’s Mill Road is the only established business in the Licking County portion of New Albany. It receives a 15-year, 75 percent tax abatement and has exceeded annual income tax revenues by $100,082.

The multitenant building built by the Pizzuti Cos., Axium Plastics and Accel, all on Smith’s Mill Road, receive 15-year, 100 percent tax abatements.

The Anomatic Corp. and Vee Pak on Smith’s Mill Road receive 10-year, 100 percent tax abatements.

Together, all five buildings are contributing $357,041 in income taxes and all are within the three-year period of meeting abatement benchmarks, Chrysler’s report said.

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The project includes a 97,000+/- expansion for a data center located on the southwest corner of New Albany Road East and New Albany-Condit Road. The estimated private investment is approximately $72 million. The project also includes the retention of 1,581 employees ($65 million annual payroll) and the creation of 162 new jobs ($7.2 million payroll). The Job Retention and Creation Tax Credits described below will not begin until the tax abatement on the existing property expires (2015).

Incentive Proposal & Value (Over the term of the incentive):

• 65% real property tax abatement on the new data center for 15 years (estimated value: $9.2 million);
• Retention & Creation Credit for 30% for ten years (value: $4.7 miillion);

Estimated Community Value (Over 15 years):

• Total income tax generated: $15.3 million
• Property Tax Revenue from data center: $4.97 million
• Property Tax Revenue from operations center: $19.5 million
• Estimated capital investment: $72 million
• Commitment to Healthy New Albany
• Commitment to sustainable development practices on the site

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Didn’t I just publish a few hours ago that the nationwide fiber-optic superhighway that crosses through northern Franklin County is making Central Ohio popular for data centers? Just after reporting that Expedient Communications, like DataCenter.bz, is scouting along the Dublin-to-New Albany line for a second data center, I found that Dallas-based Compass Datacenters LLC plans its first entry into the Central Ohio market with a planned $61.3 million development in New Albany.

View the full article at Columbus Business First.

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Nationwide Children’s Hospital said yesterday that it will join Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center as tenants in New Albany’s health and wellness center.

The children’s hospital, which has provided sports medicine services to New Albany High School since 2005, plans to lease 8,500 square feet on the proposed building’s second floor, said Gil Peri, Children’s vice president of regional development.The hospital expects that 30 to 40 employees will work at the health center and serve 12,000 patients in the first year.

View the full article at The Columbus Dispatch.

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By Robert Celaschi for Business First

Something as simple as a bottle of hand lotion can pose a big logistical hurdle. One company makes the lotion. Another company makes the bottle. A third company makes the pump. A fourth company fills the bottle. A fifth makes the packaging. A sixth packs the bottles.

One way to avoid the time and expense of shipping the pieces around the country – or even around the world – is to put the companies right next to one another. That’s what the city of New Albany has done with its business park dedicated to the personal care and beauty supply chain.

Accel Inc., a longtime supplier to Limited Brands Inc., was the first company to move into the Personal Care and Beauty Campus last year. The contract packaging company was followed this year by eight more tenants – makers of candles, cleaning products, fragrances, bottles and packaging.

Altogether the nine companies, many from out of state, fill more than 1.4 million square feet, brought more than 1,500 jobs to New Albany and have invested about $144 million in the park that allows for production, packaging, labeling and distribution all in one spot.

In the case of one company, home-fragrance manufacturer Jeyes, it meant moving 150 jobs from Mexico to New Albany. The companies’ proximity to each other has several advantages, including allowing them to cut down on transportation costs and packaging waste.

The site is part of New Albany’s sprawling, 3,000-acre business park, which has been under development since 1998. The specific site sits just across Beech Road from Abercrombie & Fitch’s home office. The New Albany Co. owns the land. Columbus developer Pizzuti put up some of the buildings.

up close and personal
Clustering is all about speed to market. Instead of shipping a bottle across the country to be filled, now it only needs to travel across the street.

“The automotive industry has done this for years,” said Jennifer Chrysler, New Albany’s director of community development. “A lot of suppliers are located in Marysville. It’s cheaper and faster to supply parts to Honda in their own back yard.”

Central Ohio’s logistical strengths include being within 500 miles of half the country’s population. New Albany’s strengths include having enough undeveloped land so that the buildings could be clustered around a single cul-de-sac.

For companies that already do business with one another in the park, proximity becomes a selling point to introduce the setup to other clients. Each becomes a reference for the others.

Not all of the companies do business with one another, but having that option for integration opens the door.

Alene Candles, a New Hampshire manufacturer with a plant in the business park, doesn’t have any customers or suppliers among its New Albany neighbors. But it is trying to get one of them to make a piece of equipment that would dramatically cut costs, said President Rod Harl.

But proximity is only part of the equation.

“I believe what we have done here in New Albany is much greater than that,” said David Abraham, CEO of Accel.

He has known and done business with some of his neighbor companies for 15 years. They meet every month to talk about ways to improve performance.

“It’s got to be that mindset that we are here to do something different,” he said. “It starts with trust and integrity of the companies that are willing to work with each other.”

Accel, for example, can work on new packaging that costs a bit less, fits a bit better in a carton, and stands up to the jostling of shipping. The people who make the product that goes in the package – say, a bottle – are right there in the business park to provide input.

“Now these companies can go to other vendors that each has, and figure how they can improve service to other customers together,” Chrysler said.

It’s an opportunity to grow, not merely sustain, each company, she said.

broadening the base
The New Albany Co. and City of New Albany drove the plans to create a Beauty and Personal Care Innovation Campus within the New Albany Business Park, which has more than 4 million square feet developed.

The beauty campus required $28 million in infrastructure improvements to get it ready. New Albany put in the roads, water lines, sewers and basic utilities so the properties would be shovel ready. The investment also included fiber-optic lines.

“We had $9 million of infrastructure in the ground in nine months,” Chrysler said. “We had road, water and sewer going in at the same time buildings were coming out of the ground.”

New Albany has been trying to balance and diversify its economic base and one of the weak spots was manufacturing and distribution, she said. The northeast quadrant of Columbus is home to Limited Brands, parent of Bath & Body Works and Victoria’s Secret.

The first company New Albany approached was Accel.

“One of their largest customers is Bath and Body Works. As they started to look for space and the New Albany business park emerged as one of the top locations, they started partnering with several other companies they work with,” she said.
supplying workers

Accel was founded in 1995 and served Bath & Body Works out of a 1,200-square-foot facility. It grew rapidly and was based in a 300,000-square-foot Lewis Center facility before moving to New Albany in June 2011. It specializes in custom packaging for retailers and pharmaceutical companies, including design, component sourcing, assembly and shipment. At its peak, Accel has 1,000 workers, including temporary and seasonal employees.

The cooperative mindset at the beauty campus includes having the right labor at the right time. So Accel started its own temporary employment agency in March.

“Our temp agency is all about complementing,” Abraham said.

Instead of someone finding sporadic work in nine different spots around the region, it’s at least theoretically possible to get 12 months of work in the same business park.

Right now the agency is supplying five of the nine companies and cross-training the temps so they could work at any company in the park.

“It’s an incubator of a career path,” Abraham said.

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A New Albany industrial park geared for small manufacturers has become attractive to companies unwilling to build standalone production plants.
Columbus developer Pizzuti Cos. has less than 30 percent of its 304,000-square-foot manufacturing building available just months after the first companies began occupying the space in the New Albany Business Park’s Personal Care and Beauty Innovation Campus. Contract manufacturer Alene Candles LLC is moving into 100,000 square feet of the building, and Jeyes Group Ltd., a British producer of home fragrances, will take 56,900 square feet of the building that was erected without tenants signed to fill it.

Specialty packaging producer Arminak & Associates in June received a state tax credit in return for its pledge to take 56,900 square feet at the Pizzuti complex. The company intends to make product dispenser pumps for Limited Brands Inc. and others.

Pizzuti Executive Vice President Jim Miller hopes to lease the remaining 87,000 square feet to a single company.

“We’ve leased up quickly given that we just made the (building) shell available in May,” he said. “Manufacturing is up in the U.S.”

The building marked Pizzuti’s second project at the campus. It earlier developed a 500,000-square-foot plant that was built for contract packager Accel Inc.

Miller said the developer has changed how it designs buildings to include larger parking lots to accommodate bigger staffs instead of tractor trailers. It also has revised building dimensions so they are more suitable for production.

“We refined our (distribution center) concept … to accommodate manufacturing and light manufacturing,” he said.

Matching the clients
New Albany Business Park has attracted companies with supply ties to retail chains under the Limited Brands umbrella, such as Bath & Body Works . Vee Pak Inc., an Illinois-based maker of product labels and packaging, opened a 105,000-square-foot plant this year. Meanwhile, Anomatic Corp., a maker of metal-coated packaging, opened a 83,000-square-foot production and design operation in June.

But Jennifer Chrysler, New Albany director of community development, said not all manufacturers in the industry that have contacted the city have the financial capacity or desire to have their own facility. She said some require less than the 100,000 to 500,000 square feet that many other vendors and suppliers have built.

She said a site-selection representative – later revealed as Arminak’s agent – had contacted the city at the time Jeyes and Alene were considering their options.

“It seemed like it would be a good fit to match up a speculative (multitenant) facility with those companies,” Chrysler said, “With Pizzuti’s vision and (park developer) New Albany Co.’s vision, we’ve been able to meet the needs of some companies who we might otherwise not have been able to accommodate.

“We continue to field calls – perhaps one every week – from somebody who is interested,” she said. “It seems, right now, the marketing activity suggests there’s a need for another facility.”

Miller said the stream of leasing has prompted interest from prospective corporate tenants and developers.
“This building is representative of the energy that’s been created up there,” he said. “We get a lot of questions about the park from outside of Columbus.”

Miller said the developer could decide this year whether to build a second multitenant complex.

“We’re assessing the velocity of the market right now,” he said. “We’re enthusiastic for manufacturing, in the right market.”

Brian R. Ball covers real estate, allied construction industries, development and the hospitality and hotel sectors for Business First.

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A single multinational client will help double sales for the maker of school-scheduling software in New Albany’s business incubator,Inc@8000.

Capture Education Inc. signed a distribution deal on June 19 with the School Systems group of Pearson Education Inc. to offer Capture’s scheduling software as a module in Pearson’s larger electronic system school districts use to manage student information including attendance, behavior and grades.

That instantly exposes the product, ScheduleSmart to Pearson’s customer base encompassing 10 million students, said Mike Neubig, president and founder of Capture Education. ScheduleSmart now is being used by 13 school districts with 130,000 students.

Pearson is an international educational publishing and technology company.

Meanwhile, Neubig can continue marketing his product independently with the Pearson seal of approval. Revenue is projected at $1.2 million this year, he said, which is more than double the $550,000 in 2011.

A former school guidance counselor in Westerville, Neubig slogged through any number of student schedules before arriving at a classic entrepreneurial a-ha moment.

“I thought there’s got to be a better way than what I call the dartboard method,” he said.

He founded the company as a consulting firm in 2006 and debuted the software product in 2010.

ScheduleSmart takes in data on individual student performance and recommends a plan for courses to take leading to graduation. It then gathers up those profiles into a recommended master class schedule for the school year, cutting time and error out of the process.

“It’s monitoring data on them and even trying to match with teachers who perform best in that (curricular) pathway,” Neubig said.

With one software developer on staff, he’ll need to hire another to write code to integrate with the system from Pearson Education, a division of UK-based publisher Pearson plc (NYSE: PSO).

In a recent interview with Columbus Business First, Ohio TechAngel Funds founder John Huston said what sets successful startups apart from others is the ability to land strategic marquee customers.

Carrie Ghose covers health care and medicine, higher education, technology and business services for Business First.

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Discover Financial Services will add a $76 million data center and create 162 permanent new jobs at its campus in New Albany, the company announced today.

Carlos Minetti, an executive vice president with Discover, made the announcement at the company’s existing field operations center in central Ohio.

View the full article at The Columbus Dispatch.

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