Sany America will be the recipient of a job credit for as much as $50,000 under a resolution approved recently by the Peachtree City Council. When the resolution was approved by council Aug. 25, it did not list Sany as the beneficiary of the “job creation grant.”
Instead, the company was referred to as “Project Z” in an effort to keep Sany’s identity under wraps for what was believed to be a matter of weeks.
It wasn’t until The Citizen inquired last week about the identity of the company that city officials revealed Sany America was the beneficiary of the job creation grant. The Citizen asked the city to name the company or cite which state law allows the city to keep the company name secret. The Open Records request was filed Monday; the city released the name of the company Thursday.
The $50,000 grant provided by council will be sized at $500 for each job created due to the expansion of the company that has a base salary of $80,000 a year or more within the 18-months following issuance of the building expansion’s certificate of occupancy, according to the council resolution.
It will be Sany’s responsibility to provide documentation to the city confirming it has met the terms of the grant in order to qualify for the payment.
Sany also won an incentive from the Peachtree City Airport Authority which runs Falcon Field immediately adjacent to Sany.
At last week’s council meeting, Sany was granted a variance allowing it to have a wall sign four times the size of the city’s size limit for such signs. City staff reasoned that the 660 square-foot sign would not be seen from any public street; also taken into account was the sheer size of the 400,000 sq. ft. building that Sany began to occupy last week.
It also was noted that the adjacent Cooper Lighting campus has a sign that is also over the city’s size limit, coming in at more than 400 sq. ft. That also did not meet city rules, but the upsizing was “handled administratively,” a city official admitted.
Sany’s campus, which features a reflecting pool and all-glass walls along its two most-visible elevations, has been lauded for its architecture. And the company’s landscape plan will further add to the ambiance of the site, officials have said.
Sany’s facility has 60,000 sq. ft. of office space in addition to some 340,000 sq. ft. in its manufacturing area. The facility will be used to assemble heavy construction equipment including crawler cranes, excavators, motor graders and concrete pump trucks. It also will be the home of Sany’s first North American-specific product, the “RT” Global Rough Terrain Crane.
The company hopes to have its first concrete pump trucks assembled later this year, soon to be followed by the cranes and hydraulic excavators.
Sany has invested some $60 million in the site, which can be expanded to meet future growth. The company initially projected to have 200 employees hired by the end of this year, growing to 300 total by the end of 2012, state officials have said.
