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PLEASANT VIEW, Utah (AP) -- Iowa-based West Liberty Foods LLC plans to build a meat processing plant in Pleasant View that eventually could employ 500 and produce 1.6 million pounds of product per week.
The announcement came after $5.7 million in incentives to bring the company to Utah was approved Tuesday by a subcommittee of the state Department of Community and Economic Development.
The plant will be built on the west end of the city in the new Pleasant View Industrial Park east of Interstate 15 and west of U.S. Highway 89. It will be near the proposed Pleasant View commuter rail stop.
No animals will be slaughtered at the facility. The company said it will consist of a 67,000-square-foot, ready-to-eat slicing facility and a 70,000-square-foot log fabrication facility. Logs are large round tubes of processed meat commonly seen in delicatessens.
In addition, Millard Refrigerated Services of Omaha, Neb., will build an adjacent cold-storage warehouse.
Mike Nelson, director of corporate recruiting and incentives for DCED, said the jobs will pay an average of $29,900, which he said is 139 percent of the mean industrial wage for Weber County.
West Liberty Foods is a major co-packer, private-label manufacturer and food service supplier of sliced and processed meat and poultry products.
A corporate descendant of the Louis Rich company, and later owned by Oscar Mayer and Phillip Morris, the current company was formed in 1996 as a cooperative owned by Iowa turkey ranchers when Phillip Morris closed the West Liberty, Iowa plant.
Since then, West Liberty Foods has expanded to three plants employing nearly 1,500 in Iowa. This new Utah plant, the company's fourth, is its first in the West.
Nelson said the incentives from Utah are based on the amount of taxes the company is expected to pay, factored in with the amount of wages and numbers of jobs.
City Administrator Nevin Limburg said the city is offering tax-increment financing to build infrastructure for the company. That method takes the increase in property tax that the land in the park gets from the new business and uses it to pay for the development of the land.
"As soon as the company starts to build, the new property taxes start to flow to the development agency," Limburg said.
That increase will be significant, he said. The company itself will spend $60 million on buildings and equipment. The total project will be close to $100 million.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
