Pennsylvania Flooring Company on Track for Revival
Quehanna, PA, June 4--In northeast Clearfield County, an area thin with substantial employers, a Virginia manufacturer and state aid have come together to resurrect a failed flooring manufacturer, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Now comes the next challenge: Getting $3.25 million in public funds to help put up a building that an official with the company said could make room for the manufacturer's growth and ensure its stay in Pennsylvania.
If it all comes together, said Jay Cooper, vice president of sales and marketing at Gammapar Inc. in Forest, Va., the future "has us salivating."
That means 50 or so jobs within a year, a total of 100 jobs sometime after that and further growth, if sales keep climbing "after an incredible start," Cooper said.
In a more populous area, the payoff might not seem worth the effort. But Ray Savel and allies trying to bring jobs to Clearfield don't have the luxury of thinking in terms of mega-employers.
"We have people who drive to State College or Altoona, an hour or more, for work," Savel, president of the region's Quehanna Industrial Development Corp., said last week. "This could become probably the largest employer here. ... In an area like ours, you get 40 jobs, 100 jobs, you jump for joy."
Until it went belly up in December, PermaGrain Inc. was an employment mainstay in the area, producing flooring for buyers such as motels and shopping malls.
Competitor Gammapar two months ago used holding company Prism Enterprises to buy bankrupt PermaGrain's assets. Last month, Prism said it is investing more than $3.5 million to restart the operations in Clearfield County, under the PermaGrain name. The commonwealth, in turn, contributed $235,000: a $75,000 grant, $110,000 in job tax credits and $50,000 for job training.
"The relationship with the state is very positive," Cooper said.
That's probably good, because Prism is going to want more. The company wants money to consolidate its Clearfield operations under one roof and maybe to use an extra manufacturing process that it currently has only at its Forest, Va. headquarters. That process uses relatively benign cobalt-60 to bond acrylic to wood and make more durable flooring.
Since the mid-1970s, PermaGrain had used the process in Quehanna -- in a building that, in the 1960s, housed defense contractor Martin Marietta Corp. whose legacy there is contamination from the pernicious strontium-90 it used.
That taint is sealed in one research room but deemed enough of a threat that a $7 million cleanup -- federally funded since defunct Martin Marietta was a federal contractor -- means razing the building and the pool where PermaGrain did its acrylic-wood bonding.
For now, Prism does the bonding at its own pool in Virginia. Since the company isn't tooled to turn out the finished PermaGrain product, though, Prism ships the veneers to Quehanna for finishing.
"Is that something we want to do for the rest of our lives? No," Cooper said. "Trucking them up adds to cost and makes them less competitive."
Beyond what Cooper calls the foreseeable future, Gammapar could move everything to Virginia. But Thomas Stojek, economic development director for Clearfield County, said officials are trying to piece together a $3.25 million package to help give the company new quarters, about six miles from Quehanna.
That would let the company consolidate operations now spread between two Quehanna buildings leased from the state. But it also would let it do the bonding work it does now in Virginia.
"The more we put up there in Pennsylvania," Cooper said, "the better off we are."
That doesn't mean the new building will have to have a radioactive pool. Cooper said his company is looking at other technologies -- secret enough, he said, that he won't describe any -- that could do the same thing.
"We could come up with a world beater," he said.
