Mega mystery company coming to Kansas?

[Veritas]

Eagle - Panasonic to break ground on new Johnson County electric vehicle battery plant Wednesday



It will be interesting to follow this and see if/how it impacts the Wichita area. It will also be interesting to see if this program draws any other large projects and if any of them find their way to our metro in the future.

JoCo had 308 acres for this development. Does Sedgwick County have available that much land for sale/development for a single transaction?

How large is the Butler county space that El Dorado was using to lure an automobile plant?

[SubGod22]

According to Greater Wichita Partnership, if I'm reading this all correctly, El Dorado Industrial Area 2 has 740 Acres available.

Reno County Industrial Complex in Hutch shows 509 Acres. Also mentions being five parcels, which I'm guessing is about 100 each. Not that a large potential business would be limited to one parcel.

Kansas Logistics Park in Newton shows 400 Acres. Though I'm not sure all of that is available or if that is what remains available.

There's apparently just under 400 Acres near Haysville (off Meridian between 79th and 87th). It's broken into five tracks of land currently..

Looks like there's another one in El Dorado that's 257 Acres. It's labeled as Tract 3 & Tract 7.

Derby Corporate Park is 165 Acres available. Though it mentions limited industrial uses.

Bel Aire has 125 Acres for industrial development near 53rd and Greenwich.

Rose Hill has 120 Acres around Butler and 230th.

Kansas Enterprise Industrial Park in Hutch has about 120 Acres available.

El Dorado West Industrial Park has 105 Acres available.

Jabara Airport has 102 Acres of industrial available.

Strother Field Airport/Industrial Park in Winfield has 100 Acres.

Industrial Site 2-Graves Property in El Dorado is 100 Acres. It's a little north of the El Dorado West spot.

It just keeps getting smaller after that. But we do have four locations with more land than the DeSoto site. Nine more that are between 100 and 300 Acres. Most of them have good/easy access to major highways and/or rail.

This is also assuming that the data provided in this site is current and all of this land is still available in totality and none have been split and sold.

And I'm pretty sure all of the above sites are currently zoned for industrial use. I skipped over some that were zoned for agriculture, though rezoning isn't impossible, especially if something on this large a scale were in the works.

[Veritas]

That looks promising. Thanks for the research and post!

[SubGod22]

No problem. I'd never thought about looking into such things, so when you posed the question I couldn't resist. Landing a project half the size of DeSoto would still be huge and impactful to many of these areas. I know El Dorado really wants to get something going and they have a number of areas and easy access to I35, 254 which easily connects to 135, as does 196. Highway 77 is also accessible as is 54 quite easily and they have available rail service.

I was raised to dislike El Dorado, but I'd love to see Butler County get a big win. It also wouldn't hurt the prospects of my hometown being able to get a boost down the road.

I'm sure there are people in the metro area that are working on things, and I know Gov. Kelly previously mentioned that I think nine different companies had reached out or expressed interest after the Panasonic deal was announced. Certainly the 316 has to be attractive so someone.

[Shockm]

This is an interesting business article. Coffee County, a rural county is competing with a Wichita Company on federal monies that originated with the money luring Panasonic to the Northeast Ks corridor. (Semi-Conductor Batteries)

Wichita and Coffey County are competing for Kansas megaproject incentives, sources say

It is pitting rural Kansas vs. Wichita according to the person who is heading the Coffee County project with the Wichita project only netting 100 jobs, and the Coffee County project netting 1000 jobs (again according to Skipper). The Wichita company "Integra" is not ready to project the numbers of jobs that it could create at this time.

Skipper told the commission that Coffey County and surrounding counties should band together to lobby for their project if it hopes to edge out Wichita. “It’s no surprise that blue suits with big money who lobby the state constantly, like the project out of Wichita, they get a lot of consideration that rural America just normally does not get,” Skipper said. “And we are rural America, but we have a significant project in our backyard that we’re pushing.” Private investment could be as high as $3.5 billion, he said. “Downstream from that, we haven’t put a number on it,” Skipper said in an interview. “But you’re talking about all the little mom and pop suppliers, all the new hires for trucking companies, destinations and restaurants, new students in schools, housing — all the downstream trickle-down. It’s kind of mind-blowing.” Skipper told the Coffey County Commission that Wichita’s project would create “roughly 100 jobs” while the Coffey County project would bring in “about ten times that number.” Neither of those estimates could be independently verified.

Read more at: https://www.kansas.com/news/politics...#storylink=cpy

[SubGod22]

I'll refrain from judgement until there are real numbers involved. Though I will say that I'm definitely not opposed to certain more rural counties scoring wins. I've driven through enough towns over the years that you can tell once had life, but because of jobs they've slowly withered away. The potential of a larger business coming in and bringing new life and people to areas can be huge and still benefit the state as a whole. And Coffey County winning something could be a boost for a number of communities in Coffey and surrounding counties.

With that said, I'd personally still rather see the metro get a big win or ten.

[Shockm]

From the article, it doesn't appear that the Wichita Metro (Integra) is wanting to make the competition public and personal, but the comments from the leader of the Coffee County leader do seem to be pointed that way. His point that many mom and pop shops (1,000 jobs according to him) will spring up in their county if they receive the "grant", and that won't happen in the metro probably doesn't ring truthful. If you know what has happened in Wichita, the aircraft industry has been the spring board for many blue collar "mom and pop" companies in the county, including machinists, etc. I would think that those same jobs would pop up in Sedgwick, and surrounding counties for also. The one "feather in our cap" that our local county has to offer is that we have the educational foundations to help this industry thrive with trained employees through Wichita State, WSU Tech, etc. I don't believe that Burlington has that "feather".

I would imagine that there are some rural legislators who would like to see a rural area win jobs, but it may not be as successful.

[SubGod22]

The Wichita project might very well create fewer new jobs as Integra has been a part of the community and has certain local suppliers already. Now, we don't know exactly what this expansion would do or how many jobs it would create. Neither does Skipper. But considering Coffey has I'm guessing nothing already up and running that would be of significant value to their proposed project it would potentially create more new jobs. But then you can also turn to and say the metro is more equipped to support and grow and staff new business/jobs whereas Coffey would be relying on more outside support. Not that it wouldn't get there, but they don't have quite the base. This is why metro areas are always favored in large projects. Infrastructure and bodies.

I get what Skipper is trying to do, but I'm not sure it's a good look for him or the proposed project to be so combative about it. I'll still be interested to see how it plays out.

I also didn't realize that APEX only had one more grant left in it. I know they limited it to one per year, but I didn't realize it had an end date of '23. If there's really been as much interest in it as we've been led to believe previously, one would have to wonder if it gets extended or modified and extended somehow.

[shocker_torero]

Yeah, interesting article. Should be read in the context of why it was written in the first place. Coffey County trying to advertise and fight for their rural county.

I personally wouldn’t take too much stock in his words. You can throw out all sorts of numbers when you have no real investors proposing anything. Sounds like both project proposals are entirely separate.

I wrote about the possibility of an Integra tech expansion months back in the Wichita State Poised for Massive Growth thread. Integra is listed as a partner in the winning build back better grant proposal that WSU just won. That proposal didn’t say Integra exactly, but did list expansion of a microchip (or similar) plant as part of the proposal. That winning grant proposal also states that they intend to keep expansions centralized near an epicenter of already occurring activity (not their exact words). Chances are that’s the WSU Innovaton Campus or close to Wichita, especially with the new NIAR building being built on that campus as part of the same winning grant.

[SubGod22]

This was previously mentioned in the 316 thread, but I'm going to do my best to keep APEX related topics in here. I do think it will be renewed, though they may alter some of the requirements that they added for Integra that weren't included for Panasonic.

WBJ - Integra CEO: APEX incentives will help company 'grow where it all began'

An expansion of this magnitude, Robinson agreed, would not happen without APEX, nor without support from the CHIPS Act, which passed in August 2022 in an effort to revitalize domestic manufacturing and strengthen the U.S. supply chain.

"There's no commercially viable way to do this without federal funding, and that is why the CHIPS Act passed in the first place," Robinson said.

He explained it an analogy: "It's like mom and pop hardware stores, right? They can't sell a shovel for the same price as a big-box, but if somehow they can go buy the same quantity of shovels, they could sell for the same price as big-box, and that's really where to semiconductor industry is today in this country. We're very much like the mom-and-pop hardware store. The difference is there's national security implication to being in that position."

The project also would not have happened, Robinson said, without support from partners such as the Workforce Alliance of South Central Kansas, Wichita State University and WSU Tech, which have committed to developing a workforce outreach and training plan to support Integra's hiring efforts.

"The final decision was really based on the combination of the incentive package and the overwhelming support our plans have received," he said.

Interesting nuggets from the article also include the fact that they've had to bring someone in to do vibration analysis at all of the potential sites. I never would have considered it, but I guess considering the work they do and how sensitive it is that every little thing matters. A site is said to be announced in the next week or two. Guessing we can rule out any land near an airport or railroad. I'd have to go back and look at parcels in the area and see which ones could hold a 1M sqft facility that also isn't located near those things. I might do that at some point this week if time allows.

I don't remember all of the exact locations of large parcels off the top of my head, but being a BuCo resident I have some memory of the El Dorado options, of which there were many. But I believe they're all pretty near the railroad which would pretty much eliminate El Dorado as a potential site. There were a number around Wichita, but you start getting into roads and intersections I'm simply not familiar with and I'd have to go back and look and then pull things up to figure it out. I would wonder if there's enough land somewhere in NE Wichita that is away from the railroad that goes through the area out between Webb and Greenwich. It would keep the facility relatively close to their current offices. But you also have a lot of air traffic headed towards Jabara and Textron East.

[SubGod22]

This could also be a big deal for WSU and WSU Tech. I'm assuming there are fields of study through those schools that could play into potential employment with Integra. No doubt, Integra will be doing a nation wide search for hiring as well as 2000 is a lot of jobs and I'm going to assume at least some of them are going to need specific education and/or experience to perform. But long-term, much like with the cyber security growth in the area, this could bolster what some of the local colleges provide.

[SubGod22]

WBJ - INTEGRA PUSHES ITS CHIPS ALL-IN - Wichita semiconductor company's massive plans include funding, hiring challenges

"The banking systems today all depend on electronics. Medical devices depend on electronics. Everything in our daily lives depends on electronics," said Brett Robinson, president and CEO of Integra Technologies.

While the pandemic highlighted the challenges of offshore manufacturing, Robinson says it was a focus of the U.S. government even before Covid-19.

"They recognized the national security concerns of not having this chip production in the United States," he said. "Today, about 50% of all chip production is split between China and Taiwan, so any geopolitical event, even a severe weather event that limits access to that area of the world in the supply chain, is going to be devastating."

In fact, Robinson said Integra Technologies hired an architecture firm to start laying out what a new facility might look like before the coronavirus swept across the globe.

"The building grew significantly through the pandemic, because we realized that we needed to get more of this production back on shore," he said.
.....
As for the parts Integra puts together, Robinson said the company bought a huge amount of inventory of raw materials when Covid first started to break out in China — a business decision that ended up paying off.

"Throughout Covid for what we were building, we had only a handful of late deliveries," he said.

In the U.S., chip makers are currently producing low volume but a high mix of product — which means small lot sizes with equipment that has be torn down frequently and reset to run another small batch of product.

The new Wichita facility, meanwhile, will allow for high-volume production of prototypes that are coming out Integra's Silicon Valley facility, with equipment that will run for several weeks or months.

"Today, each product type has maybe million of units that we run, and in the new factory it will be billions," Robinson said. "So once it actually matures to the point that it's ready to run that kind of volume, instead of transferring to Asia, we will transfer it to Wichita."

Looks like they don't expect the facility to be fully operational until 2028.

[Kung Wu]

For WSU and WSU Tech, this can also be a significant event. I'm presuming that such institutions provide academic programmes that would be relevant to future work with Integra. Integra will undoubtedly conduct a nationwide search for candidates because 2000 jobs is a large number, and I'm going to presume that at least some of them will require a particular level of education and/or expertise to accomplish. However, in the long run, this might support what some of the neighbourhood colleges offer, much as with the expansion of cyber security in the region.

Dawn of the AI spam bot. Yeesh.

[WstateU]

WBJ - INTEGRA PUSHES ITS CHIPS ALL-IN - Wichita semiconductor company's massive plans include funding, hiring challenges



Looks like they don't expect the facility to be fully operational until 2028.

They need to build Angry!

[SubGod22]

This one isn't a part of APEX, but it still sounds like a pretty massive win for Kansas, and it isn't located in either the Wichita or KC metro areas.

$1.9 billion computer chip production facility to make its way to Kansas (msn.com)

BURLINGTON, Kan. (WIBW) - As a computer chip shortage in the U.S. causes prices to skyrocket, one company will open a new $1.9 billion computer chip production facility in the Sunflower State and create thousands of jobs.

On Monday, Feb. 20, Kansas Governor Laura Kelly traveled to EMP Shield in Burlington to announce that the company will invest $1.9 billion in a computer chip production facility in the Sunflower State.

“Bringing economic prosperity to every corner of the state – particularly rural Kansas – has been a priority since my very first day in office,” Kelly said. “We achieve that with this project, creating thousands of high-paying jobs that don’t require a four-year degree and proving that every Kansas community is ripe for investment and growth.”

Gov. Kelly indicated that the move will produce thousands of highly-coveted computer chips per week and create 1,200 new jobs. Wages for the new positions will average $66,000 each year.

“This high-tech advanced manufacturing project will provide lucrative career opportunities for hard-working Kansans,” Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of Commerce David Toland said. “Our economic development strategy is designed to keep nurturing the roots of our young talent so they can remain here in Kansas.”

I'd have to go back and look, but this may be one of the other companies that were aiming for the APEX award with Integra Tech. It appears that Kansas is trying hard to take advantage of the federal CHIPS program/funding as I believe Integra is also involved in that as well.