RSS Feed
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Mega steel mill The prospects for a huge German steel mill near Calvert in north Mobile County looks good and will create jobs and spur the economy for Clarke County if it is built. It is about 50 miles to Calvert from Grove Hill, but that's an easy drive. A lot of workers drive that far and farther to work everyday. ThyessenKrupp Steel AG and ThyssenKrupp Stainless AG will jointly build a $2.3 billion (no that isn't a misprint, it is billion) plant in either north Mobile County or along the Mississippi River in south Louisiana. The megan mill will require over 3,000 acres. More interesting- and mind-blogging- is that over 29,000 construction jobs will be created. When you consider that there are only 28,000 or so people in all of Clarke County, that figure is truly amazing! The plant would directly employ approximately 3,000 people (twice the population of Grove Hill if you want to use another comparative figure) with the potential of 38,000 to 52,000 indirect jobs over a 20- year period. This is big. Very big. Everyone within a 100-mile radius or so of the proposed plant site needs to realize that they will certainly feel a positive ripple- or maybe an even greater wave- if it goes through. The plant isn't assured. Alabama and Louisiana are in a fierce bidding war for it. You may say that government shouldn't pay for private industries to locate anywhere and that may be the case. But those who don't pay, don't get the plants and the jobs. Gov. Bob Riley has called a special session next week to up the state's debt limits and to ratify other incentives, all part of the effort to secure ThyssenKrupp as well as other undisclosed industries the state is working with. The special session will cost $100,000 or so and some Democratic legislators have said the governor should not have called a special session; that the incentives could have been approved in the regular session that starts a week later. Perhaps so, but with partisan politics and special interest influences being what they are, why chance even a remote possibility of the incentives not being approved? Gov. Riley is doing the right thing in isolating the issues in a special session. Too much is at stake not to do so.
Alabama and southwest Alabama appear to be on the move and we are proud!
|
for larger version       Ads have a Patent Pending. Click Here for More Information |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
