The union--currently located at 1750 New York Ave., NW--is receiving a $250,000 conditional loan from the State of Maryland to assist with the construction costs. It has also been offered a $25,000 Workforce Training Agreement for employee training and skills upgrade by the Anne Arundel EDC, as well as assistance with permitting and regulatory assistance.
The union has a nationwide footprint and was open to other jurisdictions--so long as they could accommodate two non-negotiables, Hannon says: reasonable development costs and a start date of this July to begin construction. "The real task for us was to convince the Union that we could move them through a development approval process that obviously had a number of hurdles," according to Hannon. The site's mix of uses was a complicating factor; there were also regulatory and environmental issues that had to be taken into account with the site.
The state and county recruiting endeavors apparently meshed well for the union: after it determined it could start construction on July 1, it sealed the deal with Hanover.
The union is one of several companies or organizations that have recently announced plans to move to Maryland; others are the International Baccalaureate Organization, Power Electronics and the National Joint Apprenticeship Training Center.
Competition for development and corporate site selection among the states of Maryland and Virginia and the District has always been rigorous; efforts to recruit businesses to locate or relocate have only intensified with the recession. Recent wins by Virginia include Hilton Hotels--which picked Tysons Corner, VA, for its new headquarters earlier this year--and Raytheon, which is consolidating some of its Northern Virginia operations in four offices it is leasing at AOL's Pacific Corporate Park in Dulles, VA. For its part, the District snagged DHL Express' 70,000-square-foot industrial operations--a consolidation of several suburban facilities. DHL Express took space at Stanley Martin Commercial's 800k SF United Industrial Park, located on the 3000 block of V St., NE.
© Touchpoint Markets, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more inforrmation visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
Erika Morphy
Erika Morphy has been writing about commercial real estate at GlobeSt.com for more than ten years, covering the capital markets, the Mid-Atlantic region and national topics. She's a nerd so favorite examples of the former include accounting standards, Basel III and what Congress is brewing.
