After a decade in Franklin, Cooper Tire and Rubber Co. is relocating to a nearly one million square-foot warehouse that is under construction in Whiteland.
The Findlay, Ohio-based tire company is relocating its distribution center because it has outgrown the 807,042 square-foot space it occupies at 500 Bartram Parkway in Franklin, said Gary Horn, investment officer for Mohr Capital, which is developing the Whiteland warehouse at 225 E. Whiteland Road. Mohr also developed the Franklin site.
The move will take the company and its equipment about 8 miles northwest. By moving to the 996,930-square-foot building in Whiteland, Cooper will gain space to store more goods and park more trailers, Horn said. The company doesn’t have an exact number yet, but may add a few jobs, he said.
Whiteland Town Manager Norm Gabehart is glad Whiteland had a hand in keeping Cooper, the fifth largest tire manufacturer in North America, local, he said.
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Click here to purchase photos from this gallery“The important thing is that they are staying in Johnson County,” Gabehart said. “When we look at these folks who are working in Franklin, they are probably looking to keep working in Johnson County.”
The town did not seek to poach the company from Franklin, Gabehart said. Not just for the sake of the town’s growth, the goal was to keep jobs and tax dollars local and work together to advance the regional economy, he said.
“They had exhausted all of their efforts in Franklin. It wasn’t a City of Franklin issue. It was more a facility size issue. They just didn’t have room to grow there,” Gabehart said.
For most companies looking to move or grow in the county, the address matters less than the opportunities having a business in Johnson County presents, he said.
The Whiteland Town Council last month approved a 10-year real property tax break for the company to relocate to Whiteland. Mohr plans to invest $40 million in the building, $4.7 million to buy the property and $10 million to install logistics equipment at the site, according to its tax abatement application on file with the town.
Tax abatements allow a company’s property taxes to be phased in during a period of time, typically five, seven or 10 years, as an incentive to add machinery or expand a building and create new jobs.
In this case, 49.5% of the taxes will be abated over the course of 10 years, totaling $5.3 million. The town will collect $5.4 million in new property tax dollars, compared to the $862,680 that would be collected during the same period on the 123-acre vacant lot, town documents said.
Cooper decided to leave Franklin because there was not a large enough space readily available in the city, and its current location did not allow for expansion, Franklin Mayor Steve Barnett said. This is an argument city and town leaders have repeatedly used for providing tax incentives on speculative buildings—a need to have those readily available.
The city learned that Cooper was leaving about a month ago, Barnett said. In an effort to keep Cooper in the city, officials reached out to the company and presented the option of moving into another industrial development at Interstate 65 and State Road 44, he said.
But the company was already too far in the process of developing the new site to accept the city’s offer, Barnett said.
In 2008, the City of Franklin gave the company 10-year tax breaks on real and personal property, which ended in 2018.
Though the distribution center is leaving the city, Barnett is glad it is staying in Johnson County, keeping both jobs and tax dollars intact, he said.
“It is not like jobs and tax dollars are leaving the community. People in Franklin who work there will still have jobs and we will still have tax dollars. We are a region. We work together here in Johnson County and we don’t have territories,” Barnett said.
The Whiteland warehouse, which gained regional attention due to its size and scope, is expected to be ready for occupancy the first quarter of 2021, so Franklin has several months to find a new tenant for its Cooper Tire facility. Barnett is optimistic, he said. Even if the building is vacant for awhile, the city will continue to collect taxes.
The city will retain tax revenue from the building and property, valued at about $28 million, but will lose taxes on the company’s personal property, or equipment, which had an assessed value of $198,490 in 2019, according to the Johnson County Assessor’s Office. The company paid $6,411 in personal property taxes last year, according to the Johnson County Auditor’s Office.
The facility houses rows and rows of tires for distribution around the country. Equipment includes shelving and picking equipment, according to city documents.
New possibilities are expected to come to fruition over the next few years in Franklin as speculative buildings go up in the planned Sunbeam Development Corporation industrial park at I-65 and State Road 44. The first of these buildings broke ground recently and is under construction now.
