NY Firm to Relocate Manufacturing Operations to SC

Officials with Pickens County and its chief economic development agency, Alliance Pickens, say that Reliable will keep its corporate headquarters in New York State, but will relocate those functions from Mount Vernon to offices it occupies in Elmsford.

Alliance officials state the deal for Reliable to build its new facility at the Pickens County Commerce Park was the conclusion of a three-year process in which the company considered a host of communities across the eastern US, including properties in Virginia and North Carolina. While the value of the incentives offered by Pickens County and the State of South Carolina was not released, the marketing effort to lure Reliable Automatic Sprinkler to the state included South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford hosting company executives for dinner at the governor's mansion.

Site work on the building will start immediately. The facility is expected to cost $12 million to build and should be operational at the end of 2005 or early 2006. Total capital investment, including equipment, has been pegged at approximately $30 million. Reliable Automatic Sprinkler, a third generation family-owned business founded in New York City in 1920, expects to create approximately 350 jobs at its new facility that will sit on 56 acres of land. Reliable will be the first tenant at the 310-acre county-owned Pickens County Commerce Park. Some 50 Westchester workers are expected to make the move to South Carolina. The firm, which has 20 sales and distribution sites in the US and abroad, employs approximately 500 workers worldwide.

"We're very excited about the future of our company in Pickens County," says Reliable president Frank J. Fee III. "We considered a number of locations in the eastern US, but Pickens County affords us access to a qualified labor force, tremendous training resources in Clemson University and Tri-County Community College, and a favorable economic climate that will help us to grow and prosper."