Pratt & Whitney has one foot out the door of its Cheshire engine repair plant.
By the time the company gets both feet out the door later this year, town and state officials hope to have a replacement company lined up for the 296,000-square-foot facility.
It’s a daunting task, even with the state’s help.
When the United Technologies Corp. was fighting to close down the Cheshire plant last year, the Connecticut General Assembly passed a law creating a special enterprise zone using various local and state incentives to entice a new company to replace Pratt, if the company did leave.
That law contained one small — but very important — typo in the implementation date.
Now that Pratt will leave the engine repair plant officially by the end of the year and has put the property up for sale, Cheshire officials are pushing for a large manufacturer to replace the aerospace company and urging state legislators to hurry up and fix the typo.
“The town wants to see it kept in productive use as soon as possible,” said David Pelletier, chairman of the Cheshire Economic Development Commission. “We are not the only town that has to deal with this… losing jobs.”
The plant employed 670 people when Pratt first announced in 2009 its intentions to close the facility. Operations will cease in the next few months, Pratt spokesman Bryan Kidder said, and then the property will be sold.
Cushman and Wakefield of Connecticut Inc. is handling the sale for Pratt, although the company doesn’t have a list price or shutdown date.
To speed up the establishment of the enterprise zone, State Rep. Mary Fritz, D-Cheshire, has introduced legislation to correct the typo. Last year, the legislature was in much a rush to create the economic development zone that it simply modified old legislation for the Stratford enterprise zone created for the Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. facility.
But the legislature forgot to change the date. The 2010 legislation created a Cheshire enterprise zone starting in 1985.
Fritz’s bill this year to fix the date has passed out of legislative committee but has bounced around without getting a full House of Representatives vote. Cheshire officials wonder why the legislature is taking its sweet time passing the fix.
“It was a struggle to keep Pratt & Whitney in Cheshire, and at the end of the day, we were not successful,” Fritz said. “To me, this is the other side of the coin to protect the tax base in Cheshire and economy of Cheshire.”
The rush to create an enterprise zone is more of a hurry-up-and-wait issue for Cheshire. Large manufacturing is leaving Connecticut and replacements are hard to come by. Over the past 10 years, manufacturing employment dropped from 232,400 to 166,100 as of March, a 29 percent drop.
“There’s few and far between 300,000-square-foot manufacturers,” said Nick Morizio, president of Colliers International in Hartford, which handles industrial real estate. “If you are a 300,000-square-foot manufacturer, you probably aren’t looking to come to Connecticut, even with an enterprise zone.”
In the 1990s, Morizio handled the sale of a former Pratt & Whitney facility in Southington. That 800,000-square-foot facility took five years to sell, and the list price of $10 million was slashed to a final sale price of $2 million.
Large plants such as the one in Cheshire are difficult to sell or lease in their entirety, Morizio said. A developer might buy that size facility for a bargain basement price and subdivide it for multiple uses.
But then Cheshire doesn’t get the jobs created by a large manufacturer.
Compared to other used industrial facilities, the Cheshire plant is well-maintained and clean, said Jerry Sitko, economic development coordinator in Cheshire.
With the enterprise zone, a new user can get corporate tax credits and real estate property tax relief. The bill includes $215,000 for any clean-up needed on the site.
“We want to put the building back to productive use,” Sitko said. “It is in Cheshire Industrial Park, and that industrial park will go head-to-head with any other industrial park in southern New England.”
Because Pratt still owns the site and controls its sale, state and town officials don’t have a say in who buys the property. The enterprise zone was established to help Cheshire compete with surrounding municipalities such as Southington, Hamden and Waterbury that already have enterprise zones.
“Everything is up in the air,” Pelletier said. “We don’t know what Pratt is going to do.”
Although manufacturing remains a $58.4 billion industry in Connecticut, the sector is slipping away in the state. According to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, the state lost 8.5 percent of its manufacturing companies from 2002 to 2007; and that was before the economic recession.
Finding another large manufacturer to fill the void left by Pratt will be harder than fixing a typo.
“Too bad they can’t keep them,” Morizio said.
