Omnova announced Tuesday that it will acquire 8.5 acres at the Chagrin Highlands corporate park for a 57,000-square-foot headquarters project.
FAIRLAWN, Ohio -- Omnova Solutions will move its headquarters from suburban Akron to suburban Cleveland, now that Beachwood's City Council and the local school district have approved incentives for the polymer company.
Omnova announced Tuesday that it will acquire 8.5 acres at the Chagrin Highlands corporate park, off Harvard and Richmond roads, for a 57,000-square-foot headquarters project. The site includes land for expansion. The publicly-traded company will maintain its technology center and two chemical plants in the Akron area.
The Plain Dealer first reported on the move in August.
Kevin McMullen, the company's chairman and chief executive officer, said Omnova spent nearly two years considering headquarters options. The company's lease on its offices in Fairlawn expires next year.
View full sizeA site plan shows the proposed Omnova Solutions headquarters project at the Chagrin Highlands corporate campus in Beachwood. "The Beachwood site is in a vibrant, expanding corporate setting where we can meet our criteria around retention, growth and cost and, at the same time, enhance the value we bring to our customers," McMullen said in a written statement. "We believe it is the perfect spot to build our future."
The company expects to break ground in the fall and to move in late 2014.
Omnova employs 365 people in Northeast Ohio. Just under a third of them work at the company's headquarters, and the company expects to add 70 jobs during the next five years at the future Beachwood campus.
On Monday evening, Beachwood City Council approved a five-year job-creation incentive grant, worth $629,000, for Omnova. Basically, the company will get back 50 percent of Beachwood's share of new payroll taxes from the project in the form of an annual rebate. The deal won't impact income tax revenues that go to the city of Cleveland, which owns the land and has a 50-50 tax-splitting agreement with Beachwood at Chagrin Highlands.
"The more new employment they bring into the city in the five years beginning in November (2014), when they take occupancy, the more they will receive," said Jim Doutt, Beachwood's economic development director.
Beachwood also approved a $500,000 relocation grant for the company and agreed to demolish a cluster of vacant armory buildings on 4.6 acres of city-owned land next to the Omnova site.
Lastly, the city and the Warrensville Heights school board signed off on a tax-increment financing arrangement, which will allocate new property-tax revenues from the headquarters project to paying off debt on the Omnova land. The company is borrowing $3 million from JobsOhio, the state's development organization, to cover most of its $3.5 million in land-acquisition costs.
The land will continue to generate property-tax revenues, and the schools will receive at least $75,000 a year from the property, Doutt said.