Local Officials Continue Push for First Quality Tissue Expansion

Mike Flanagan Pres./CEO CCEP
Mike Flanagan
Pres./CEO CCEP
LOCK HAVEN – A final push is underway to convince First Quality Tissue to locate its newest paper machine at its existing site in Castanea Township.

Mike Flanagan, head of the Clinton County Economic Partnership, went before the county commissioners at their work session Monday to update them on local “due diligence” to attract a third tissue machine to the former International Paper site on the south side of Lock Haven.

Flanagan said over the next week his office will be visiting three taxing bodies, the county, the Keystone Central School District and the Castanea Township supervisors, seeking their support for participation in LERTA, a real estate tax abetment program used as an incentive to further commercial/industrial growth.

If the local effort is successful and First Quality selects its existing site in Castanea Township, the third machine would mean more than 170 new jobs to go with the better than 400 employees onsite presently, part of a First Quality employee count of better than 1,600 in Clinton County.

Flanagan said Clinton County is a finalist for the expansion and noted First Quality earlier this year had announced an additional machine for its operation in Anderson, S.C. He said the chance of success will be enhanced with governmental approval of the LERTA (Local Revitalization Tax Assistance Act) designation.

The commissioners were asked to vote on that designation at their meeting this Thursday and there was no indication they would not support the request. Board chairman Pete Smeltz said the county unemployment is too high, 6.6 percent as of July, fifteenth from the bottom among Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.

Smeltz amplified on Flanagan’s numbers as to the effect of the LERTA program which provides a staggered introduction of real estate taxes over a 10 year period, the applicable amount of taxes due going up each year:

The initial First Quality machine was installed in 2004 at the old paper mill location and full taxes will be paid on that part of the First Quality property as of 2015; a second machine was installed in 2007, paying 70 percent of real estate taxes in 2015, 90 percent in 2016 and 100 percent in 2017.

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