MOUNT VERNON — United Precast is expanding its production capacity with a new facility on Harcourt Road, next to United Producers Inc. The building is being built on land recently acquired from United Producers.
“[United Producers] had 50 acres of land here,” said John Ellis, chief executive of United Precast. “We bought all of their land and their buildings and gave them a 10-year lease. What we are doing is building a production building to manufacture precast concrete.”
Ellis said the building is going to be 250 by 100 feet.
“It will have a 30-ton overhead crane and a 10-ton overhead crane to pick up the product and move it around,” he added.
Next to the producton building, Ellis said there will be a batch plant to make the concrete. The equipment came from Germany; a conveyor will move the concrete into the production building. The setup will also allow for the loading of transit mixers, in addition to fabricating pecast forms.
“We put a new road in from here across to our gravel plant, because we own all the adjoining land here,” Ellis explained. “We’ll be able to move our mixers across our road to feed our I-beam division. We manufacture I-beams at our gravel pit across Dry Creek.”
The facility will be winterized so that production can continue all year around.
“This building is a pre-engineered metal building with precast side walls,” Ellis said. “These sidewalls are what’s called an insulated panel. It’s a sandwich panel. It’s concrete on the outside, then you’ve got your 2 inches of foam in the center and the concrete surface on the inside. It keeps it quiet on the outside and warm on the inside. It’s a very durable building. It’s expensive to build, but there’s very little maintenance.”
United Precast has also allowed for future expansion. South of the new building, it has about 10 acres of land bordering Columbus Road. This, said Ellis, will give the company some options without having to worry about what will happen with United Producers and the buildings it uses when the lease runs out in about eight years.
Ellis said the new production capacity will add some jobs to the area.
“It’s going to create jobs because now we are starting to build this sound wall barrier that goes along the highway,” Ellis explained. “We’re tied in with Durisol in Canada now and we just started a job with them. And we’re bidding some more work with Durisol. You see, we didn’t have enough room down there on Roundhouse Lane to do that. Now with this new building, we have more room to make more product.”
Ellis said the building should be completed and ready to roll by spring 2009. He said March was the target date.
