Getting a potential commercial produce operation to choose a Pulaski County site over one in White County is the goal of a tax abatement approved by the county council Monday.
Joel Putt and his family are looking to set up a two-and-a-half-acre facility that would grow baby leaf and head lettuce using something called “floating raft technology.” “It’s like a four-by-eight sheet, pretty much, of Styrofoam with slits in it,” Putt told council members. “You put peat moss in each slit. The slits go into a germination room. The lettuce is germinated. Then after about seven days, it’s brought out through this conveyor here. There’s a conveyor belt (check out california industrial rubber co. to know more about how it works) which is pretty much like a lazy river for the lettuce. You can start lettuce on any one of these, and then as it matures, you can constantly keep pushing it down, pushing in down, pushing it down, and then after about 20 days, you have mature lettuce that’s ready to harvest.”
The site under consideration in Pulaski County is at the southeast corner of U.S. 421 and State Road 14/County Road 200 South, just south of West Central Schools.
Community Development Commission Executive Director Nathan Origer said the operation would bring in at least 14 jobs, with an average estimated salary of $40,000 a year. “In terms of improvements that are eligible for tax abatement, we’re looking at a little above $600,000 in real estate improvements and an assessed value of just over $200,000 in manufacturing equipment,” he said. “Now, the investment that they are going to be making if they proceed with the project is well above that, but because of the rules in place on what can and can’t be included for tax abatement, it’s a much smaller number.” The total project cost would be somewhere around $10 million, according to Putt.
Origer said due to that and a few other reasons, the county is offering a more generous tax phase-in schedule than it usually does, “And this is a competitive project. There is another county they have been looking at investing in. They’re from Francesville. They’d like to stay in the county. We’d like to keep them here. We all know that at the end of the day, sometimes business decisions have to be business decisions. So that schedule is a little bit more aggressive than it normally is.”
Putt said the abatements will play a big role in his family’s decision, but the lack of adequate natural gas at the Pulaski County site is also a factor. “So we will probably have to supplement with some type of propane or LNG, liquid natural gas, which will also weigh into our business decision of where we will go because those costs get quite large with heating three acres,” he said. “It’s three acres of glass, two-and-a-half-acres of green lettuce production, so in the wintertime, like a day like today, we’re just drinking gas.”
Putt said he planned to meet today with White County officials about the possibility of a tax abatement there. He said his family hopes to make a decision by the end of February.
