GREENFIELD — A manufacturing facility is moving down the street into a larger building and growing its operations.
Bastian Solutions Automation Engineering, which has operated at 2155 Fields Boulevard for about nine years, is heading to what is currently a warehousing property at 315 W. New Road.
Jason Lake, senior managing director for the Chicago-based real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, which is assisting Bastian, recently told the Greenfield City Council that the manufacturer plans to invest about $4 million in the move.
Riley Buttry, operations manager at Bastian Automation Engineering, told the council that the company is a division of the Indianapolis-based material handling firm Bastian Solutions, and makes custom equipment for its Toyota-owned parent company and other customers.
Buttry added that the company designs, builds, tests and integrates equipment at the Greenfield facility.
Bastian Automation Engineering’s current plant is about 65,000 square feet, Buttry said.
“It’s really just not enough room for us,” he added. “When we started out… nine years ago, there in that facility, we used just one bay of it, and we’ve continued to expand in every aspect of it.”
For instance, the company started a conveyor product line that has since gone on to open its own 80,000-square foot facility in Westfield, Buttry said.
At more than 115,000 square feet, Bastian Automation Engineering’s future Greenfield facility is nearly twice the size of its current one.
“It’s going to be a significant investment for us because it’s pretty much just warehousing space right now… and we want to turn it into full manufacturing,” Buttry said.
Lake said Bastian Automation Engineering will relocate about $3 million in machinery and equipment and make significant upgrades to the building.
“What we’d really like to do is go back to management and show that we’re trying to soften what we know is going to be an increase in cost as we go to this, including taxes,” Lake said.
The city council unanimously passed a declaratory resolution abating taxes on the value of rehabilitating the company’s future facility and the new manufacturing equipment to be installed. The 10-year abatements would start at 100 percent before diminishing by 10 points annually over the years that follow.
The council will hold a public hearing and vote on a confirmatory resolution over the abatements at its Dec. 11 meeting.
Buttry said Bastian Automation Engineering employs 66, has an annual payroll of about $3.4 million and anticipates adding 10 jobs in the next two to three years. He added 42 percent of the company’s workforce lives in Greenfield and 68 percent lives in Hancock County.
Dan Riley, president of the Greenfield City Council, told the Daily Reporter that the company is deserving of the tax breaks.
“Bastian’s been a good corporate citizen here in Greenfield, and we want to keep those jobs and that business right here in the city,” Riley said. “We are as interested in keeping all the good corporate citizens we have here as we are in enticing new ones to come.”
