Pine Bluff got some good economic news during the spring and summer with two announcements regarding new industrial facilities.
Southwind Milling, located at the Port of Pine Bluff, is expected to begin operations in the spring, creating between 26 and 46 new jobs, and Highland Pellets, Inc., will create 35 additional direct jobs and 482 indirect jobs by the time they open.
Those new businesses, as well as the acquisition of Arcelor/Mittal by Kiswire Lt., was voted the No. 4 story of the year by the staff of The Commercial.
Construction has been completed on the bins that will hold rice to be milled by Southwind, and construction of the milling plant itself is underway.
Southwind bought the property formerly occupied by Century Tube Corp. at 4125 Emmett Sanders Road. Ron Craig, construction manager for the company, said they will be running three shifts, 24-hours a day when fully operational.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Regarding Highland Pellets, Tom Reilley, chairman and co-founder of the company, said in August that the plant will manufacture wood pellets for the European market and will be used by industries that are converting from coal-fired generators to a cleaner source for generating electricity. The company expects to produce 500,000 metric tons of product annually and will obtain the wood from a 70-mile radius of Pine Bluff.
Once the pellets are produced, they will be taken to the Port of Pine Bluff and loaded onto barges, which will carry them down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico for shipment to Europe.
In June, Kiswire took over the Arcelor/Mittal facility in the Jefferson Industrial Park, and company representatives said they planned to completely refit the facility, which was expected to take 18 months and cost between $9.5 million and $11 million.
Kiswire was founded in South Korea in 1945 as Elephant Brand Wire Rope.
Meanwhile, a new financial group that was expected to acquire the former Horizon Foods/Summit Poultry location on West 2nd Avenue has not materialized and that facility, which was formerly owned by Tyson Foods, remains vacant.
During a meeting of the Economic Development Corp. of Jefferson County on May 20, Chairman George Makris said the new financial group would repay $163,000, half of what was loaned to Horizon Foods for the purchase of refrigeration equipment. The funds were received from the three-eights cent sales tax approved by Jefferson County voters in 2011.