Conneaut prime location for development

CONNEAUT – Conneaut City Manager Nick Sanford is quick to tell anyone who will listen that his city is the greatest location in the country.
The outside world has failed to see what Sanford does in the half-century following the collapse of the steel industry in Youngstown and the subsequent plant closures in northeast Ohio.
Eyes are opening, however, as developers have marked Conneaut with an giant “X” on the map because of the Risberg Pipeline and existing infrastructure.
“Energy is sort of driving a lot of these opportunities with the Risberg line in place and First Energy’s transmission lines,” Greg Myers, executive director of Growth Partnership for Ashtabula County, said during a regular Conneaut City Council work session on Monday, Jan. 5. “South of Route 90, we’ve got these transmission lines. Think of transmission lines as the energy highway. Those transmission lines carry a tremendous amount of power from outside the state.”
“The nexus is where the natural gas pipeline exists,” Myers continued. “So, ‘X’ marks the spot in Conneaut on power generation where you have the gas pipeline coming through and the existing transmission lines that First Energy owns.”
Those are attractive resources to developers, especially when considered with available land, Conneaut’s location on Lake Erie, its connection to the railroad industry, the Canadian National docks and access to Interstate 90.
“When we started talking in the community, the large community across the United States, in the development community, and the word got out around that, we were fielding five, 10 calls a week from developers that were interested, saying, ‘Hey, we hear you have power and we hear that you have land near that power.’ We’d say yes, we do. There’s been a lot of interest around that,” Myers said.
Considering all of the factors, Conneaut is a prime location for development that Myers and Ashtabula County Port Authority Executive Director Mark Winchell call transformative.
“Why that is so important with these industries that we’re looking at are they can utilize (those energy sources),” Myers said. “The industries really are twofold right now that we’re talking about on these larger opportunities. First is power generation, natural gas fire power generation. It’s taking the gas out of the Risberg line and creating an energy generation facility that does two things.”
“It can either put power back into the grid and then can be sold into the marketplace the same as any other power generation facility, or it can be used to put directly into a facility,” Myers continued. “We call that back-of-the-meter power generation. That’s really important because that’s two private entities negotiating a direct contract to provide an important asset to them, which is power generation.”
That could mean a couple of industries moving into Conneaut.
“Think the IT industry, data centers,” Myers said. “They need a lot of power, they consume a lot of power, and they want to have direct access to where that power generation is happening. Not only do they need direct power, they need redundancy, so that’s why that’s so important. You’ve got the gas that can generate power, so you’ve got direct power generation that can be purchased, and then you’ve also got the existing transmission infrastructure where they can have redundancy into that facility. That’s really where the nexus of the opportunity lies.”
Sanford was not the least bit surprised to hear about the opportunities his city has for development.
“I’m not surprised by (the opportunities) at all,” Sanford said. “We’ve been telling the world we’re the greatest location in the nation for decades, now we finally get to tell people across the country. People are seeing it and how things can be delivered and it’s going to shine a light on Conneaut, Ohio, and all of these resources that we have.”
Though Myers could not divulge the kind of development that could happen, he did say that data centers and power generation were at the forefront with more development to happen later.
“I will say the driver right now is power generation and data centers, but that’s leading to some of the other things that we’re talking about, which is redevelopment on the docks and some of these other properties that are revealed,” Myers said. “That discussion is definitely happening.”
Past development opportunities, like U.S. Steel building a mill, have come and gone without anything being completed in the city.
“We’ve seen so many things promised in the past that didn’t work out for whatever reason, usually policy changes at the federal level,” Sanford said. “That’s what U.S. Steel teaches us. Youngstown was a test case. The shift from domestic steel to foreign steel, a change in the leadership, the board of directors at U.S. Steel, is why that didn’t come to fruition.”
Other changes made an impact, as well.
“Changes in administrations (on the federal level) and partisan politics can make a split-second decision at a moment’s notice can have a huge impact,” Sanford said.
Sanford sees that the current development being talked about might be different than the ones that have failed in the past.
“Data and power are different because I don’t see that going anywhere,” Sanford said.
Sanford believes it important the people in Conneaut are aware of the possibilities their community has.
“We want to get this information out to the public because of what was studied and what we know we have resource-wise in Conneaut and certainly in Ashtabula County, to the point we’re at a rare threshold in history where we can control our own destiny,” Sanford said.
Sanford wants to seize those opportunities while they exist.
“We owe it to ourselves, the people of Conneaut and, certainly, our parents and grandparents, the people who built this great city, to deliver this new market economy,” Sanford said.
Economic development would not be confined to one project.
“I want to be really clear about this, we’re not just talking about an opportunity to do power generation, natural gas fire power generation, and then data and say we’re done,” Myers said. “No, what this does, from our perspective, from an economic developed perspective, it creates an opportunity for us to generate other resources that we need to do redevelopment that’s on the industrial side, that’s on the logistics side.”
Property owned by Canadian National, the upper coal dock area east of the CN docks, as well as land south of I-90 are prime locations being discussed.
“There’s a 250-acre parcel that we’ve been looking at for redevelopment, rail served, obviously water served,” Myers said. “If we can utilize a project like this to have access power generation, that becomes a really interesting opportunity to keep building the puzzle pieces together to create a very competitive picture for redeveloping areas like that.”
Development related to power generation, data centers or a mixed-use project could be suited for a Canadian National-owned property known as the BLE site south of I-90.
“It’s a 285-acre site, a fair amount of wetlands on it,” Myers said. “The power lines transverse it right now, but there is an opportunity there on that site to do development, as well. You have a nexus of rail, you have a nexus of power, you have highway accessibility.”
Other sites have potential, as well, like a 100-acre site up near the lake, for example, but there is also potential to maximize sites that may not immediately appear to have potential.
“We’ve looked at every opportunity and tried to say, ‘Hey, maybe you want to think about rearranging that site to maximize the footprint there,’ but there is a tremendous amount of interest in that as an industrial development site that leverages logistics, access to power, access to rail, and to water-borne transportation,” Myers said.
The city also has the industrial park, but Myers noted that development is being considered for not just one of the city’s properties. The goal is to develop as many of them as possible.
“The industrial park’s another area where it could be data, it could be industrial development, it could be any number of different things,” Myers said. “These play off of one another, they’re not individual projects that are in a silo. I think we look at them holistically.”
Myers made it clear that no development is imminent.
“I want to stress that even though certain activities have happened, we can get into those, but speaking generally, we’re really on the front end of this,” Myers said. “We’re just now starting. This is a very long process. When I say long, we’re talking multiple years. Nothing’s going to happen tomorrow. Nothing’s going to happen within this year, in terms of projects being announced. There’s a lot of groundwork that needs to happen in order for them to take place, but that groundwork, again, is going to require engagement with the community. That’s why we thought it was important just to start having a dialogue around that.”
Sanford asked Myers if he could compare possible development to the U.S. Steel deal of decades ago.
“It’ll far surpass U.S. Steel,” Myers said. “U.S. Steel will be a pebble dropped in the bucket relative to the financial boulder that these projects would be. We know that, and we know that in a way because there’s other developments like this that have already happened throughout the State of Ohio. We know their valuations.”
“We can’t project that here, but we can project relative to the size of the value on what that property was generating in taxes before those developments occurred and what’s happening in them now,” Myers continued. “We can get a rough idea of what a development might be valued at and what that might mean from a tax impact perspective. Again, we can’t give you a dollar amount because we don’t even have all the details of the projects. We want you to understand that we’re talking about transformational sorts of investments that lead to transformational impacts to the schools, to the community, to the county at large.”
Along those lines, Myers was hesitant to put exact numbers on the financial impact a development might have on the city.
“We didn’t come here today and we can’t say to you, when we project out some of this, this is how many tax dollars that are going to come in,” Myers said. “What I can say is that we’re talking about transformational money. We’re talking about tax revenue that comes into the community that I believe, and this is my opinion on this, looking at some of these, it will transform this community in a way that’s never been seen in its history.”