MOUNT VERNON — With Siemens Energy announcing it will close its Mount Vernon facility later this year, the question now turns to what will happen at the 47-acre complex on North Sandusky Street.
“The reductions will occur in multiple phases over the next year and affect employees from Siemens’ Power and Gas, Power Generation Services, and Dresser-Rand businesses, as well as some corporate functions,” a Siemens spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Knox Pages. “This difficult decision was made as part of a necessary step to enable Siemens to meet the competitive pressures in the global energy market by reducing costs and best serving our customers.
“As we move forward in this process, it is our highest priority to assist employees in this transition,” the statement continued. “Siemens anticipates the workforce reductions and site closure will affect approximately 400 employees in total and about 40 percent of those affected will be provided with the option to relocate to another Siemens facility. Siemens will also help to identify opportunities at other companies in the area and provide the highest level of support to those affected by offering severance packages and career counseling services. We thank them for their continued hard work, dedicated service, and professionalism.”
When the facility was owned by Rolls-Royce, it employed just over 1,000 people in the Mount Vernon area, though the workforce was reduced by 10 percent after shortly after Siemens announced it would be purchasing the company. When the business officially switched over to Siemens on Dec. 1, 2014, the gradual reductions continued. Just six weeks after the signs changed from Rolls-Royce to Siemens, the energy company announced it would be laying off 25 to 30 percent of its workforce, or about 50 salaried employees and 200 union workers.
Another reduction in the local Siemens workforce occurred in 2016 when the company announced that package assembly and test activities were being transferred out of the Mount Vernon facility and into other sites within the Siemens company.
According to information compiled by the Knox County Area Development Foundation, Siemens remains one of the top 25 employers in the county, but it has fallen drastically on the scale of the number of people employed. Rather than competing with the likes of Ariel Corporation (1,500 employees) or Knox Community Hospital (900 employees), Siemens comes in at number 10 with 275 employees, according to data gathered in November 2017.
Once Siemens employees clock out for the final time, the facilities will be empty, prompting a prime opportunity for new businesses to come into the Mount Vernon community.
“It’s a really big deal (to lose Siemens),” said Jeff Harris, president of the Knox County Area Development Foundation. “They’ve been losing people ever since the Cooper Rolls-Royce days. But the fact that we still have about 400 jobs being lost forever to Mount Vernon — it’s a big deal.”
Harris said the city of Mount Vernon will take a hit to its income tax revenue and hundreds of residents may relocate to stay with the company or lose their jobs outright. A number of those jobs were well-paid engineering-type occupations with benefits that were supposed to move into a renovated office space within the complex. That space was to become one of Siemens’ global Customer Operations Centers.
“Now we’re going to have a virtually brand-new, unused office building in downtown Mount Vernon that was renovated,” Harris said. “It will be available to lease to new users.”
As the community settles from the loss of an important employer, those behind the scenes will continue full bore toward bringing more businesses into that complex.
“In the study we performed last year on the Siemens campus, we had wanted to turn that unused space into another industrial park in Mount Vernon. It’s still all systems go on that, but where we thought we would be trying to fill 40 acres of space, it’s now going to be the entire 47-acres we’re going to try to refill.”
In 2016, Siemens Energy, the State of Ohio, American Electric Power, and Ohio Cumberland Gas collaborated to pay for an assessment of the Siemens Energy facility. The city of Mount Vernon kicked in $35,000 for the $159,500 assessment, which intended to find a way to repurpose the Siemens facility as the workforce reduced.
Siemens was awarded a $700,000 JobsOhio Ohio Revitalization Fund grant in 2017. The funds were to help renovate and improve 37,000 square feet of the Engineering Center, also known as the former En-tronic Controls building. According to a Knox Pages report, the complex is owned by Cooper Energy, who signed a 99-year lease with Siemens. It was intended that Siemens would sublease the space for profit.
“Although they were awarded a JobsOhio grant to fix up the building, they never took any of the money,” Harris said.
Bringing in new business and filling the space won’t be a short-term project. Harris estimated a 10-year timeframe, but cautioned that the businesses will not be like the ones that were there before.
“I’m telling everybody that will listen — we will never again see a 1,000-plus employee company come into town and have that many jobs,” Harris said. “What I would hope we would do is we have a large number of different companies using different buildings on that campus each with their own employees. That would be the best case scenario, you know, 10 years out.”
That means Knox County will have to be innovative in the way it markets itself to new businesses, especially when dealing with 47 acres of structures that were mostly built in the 1800s.
“It’s like anything, as the market changes, we have to adjust and adapt. Adapt or die,” Harris said. “We have to figure out, okay, the world is a pretty different place than it was 120 years ago. What can we do?”
Harris already has an answer for that question and it’s a path that Knox County started on nearly two years ago with the assessment. “We studied the buildings, we ascertained all the utility infrastructure in the ground, we understand what those buildings look like inside and out. Now we have to market it to a whole slew of new end users that’ll be smaller than what we had on that property before.”
