CLAY — Feldmeier Equipment, Inc. — a manufacturer of heat exchangers, vessels, and other products — is planning to move its headquarters from 6800 Townline Road in DeWitt to a larger facility at 7643 Edgecomb Drive in the town of Clay. Feldmeier Equipment is expected to close on the 130,000-square-foot building in mid-December, according […]
CLAY — Feldmeier Equipment, Inc. — a manufacturer of heat exchangers, vessels, and other products — is planning to move its headquarters from 6800 Townline Road in DeWitt to a larger facility at 7643 Edgecomb Drive in the town of Clay.
Feldmeier Equipment is expected to close on the 130,000-square-foot building in mid-December, according to its VP of sales and marketing, David Pollock.
Georgia–based Kloeckner Metals Corporation is selling the property to Feldmeier for $2.8 million. Ed Rogers of JF Real Estate in Syracuse helped arrange the transaction, Pollock adds.
“We’re doing this because there is an expectation of upwards of 40 percent growth in the next two to five years,” Pollock says, and the company needs to expand its engineering, technical, and manufacturing spaces to meet that expected demand. He declined to provide company revenue totals.
Space at the current DeWitt facility — 11,000 square feet for offices and 67,000 square feet for manufacturing — has been maxed out, according to Colby Clark, Feldmeier Equipment’s VP of operations. The new site would provide 15,000 square feet for offices and 115,000 for manufacturing.
Feldmeier Equipment plans to invest an additional $3 million to $3.5 million on the new facility in the form of renovations, a small expansion, and modernized equipment, according to Clark.
The renovations will include new flooring, painting the walls, and new lighting in the building’s fabrication space to produce products for the pharmaceutical industry, according to Pollock.
The office spaces will be gutted. “There’s going to be a total revamping of the existing office space, both internally and externally,” Clark adds.
The small expansion will be for employee spaces, such as a break room, cafeteria, and locker room, he adds. Moving equipment into the facility will likely begin in the third quarter of 2016, once the renovations are complete.
Feldmeier Equipment will fund the facility purchase and the changes through a combination of credit and company funds, Clark says. He declined to provide specific figures. Credit would be provided by M&T Bank (NYSE: MTB), according to Pollock.
Feldmeier Equipment is also seeking tax incentives from the Onondaga County Industrial Development Agency in the form of a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes, or PILOT, and a sales and use tax exemption, according to OCIDA documents. A Feldmeier representative is meeting with the agency Dec. 8 to finalize the terms of the PILOT, according to Pollock, meaning the total savings is not yet determined.
The hiring of more employees is not expected to accompany Feldmeier’s move into the larger facility, according to Clark. The firm has 128 full-time employees currently working at the DeWitt plant, he adds. If the forecasted growth comes to fruition, however, the company will need to hire manufacturing and engineering personnel to keep pace.
“We definitely anticipate revenue growth in this new facility. It’s very difficult to quantify what that’s going to be,” Clark says.
It is not yet known how many of the 128 employees will move to the facility in Clay.
Even though Feldmeier Equipment will move its headquarters and much of its manufacturing capabilities into the larger Clay facility, it plans to hold onto the smaller DeWitt building.
“We’re going to continue to utilize it as required,” says Pollock. Some of the functions at the current DeWitt plant may stay there, he adds, “to help augment what we’re going to be doing at the new facility.”
Work at the Clay location will be an expansion of what the DeWitt plant already produces.
The firm is still working on the industrial design plans for the new facility, which will help dictate what functions will remain at the DeWitt plant. Feldmeier Equipment has hired Syracuse–based Hayner Hoyt Corp. as the general contractor for the project, according to Pollock. Syracuse architectural firm Schopfer Architects LLP has been hired as a sub-contractor, he adds.
Past and future
The family-owned Feldmeier Equipment, founded in 1952, has generated considerable growth in the past two decades.
“We’ve grown from one facility in [the Syracuse area], in the mid-90s to — this will be our seventh manufacturing facility. Four in upstate New York,” Pollock says. That includes a brand new, 50,000-square-foot manufacturing facility near its plant in Little Falls, which opened in March 2014.
“We always seem to be keeping ourselves busy,” he says.
The other three Feldmeier facilities are in Alabama, Nevada, and Iowa. In addition to its work in the pharmaceutical field, the company also manufactures heat exchangers, vessels, and related products for the biotech and cosmetic industries, as well as for brewers and food, dairy, and beverage-processing facilities, according to the company website.
Feldmeier Equipment employs about 430 employees total, Clark says.
The company does not have any other projects in the works, according to Pollock. “We’ll get this one under our belt and figure out where we’re going from there, but
we don’t have any additional plans.”
Clark stresses the need to focus on the work at hand. “We need to do [the renovations] right, and we have one opportunity to do so.”