City sells land to organic dairy company promising 150 jobs
When the final vote was spoken, Mayor Brian Treece turned to the front row of the audience in the Columbia City Council chambers.
“Welcome to Columbia,” he said to the half-dozen people seated there from Colorado.
Treece and six city council members had just approved selling the city’s land to the group from Aurora Organic Dairy, a company that hopes to build an 80,000-square-foot milk and dairy processing plant at the corner of Route B and Waco Road in northeast Columbia. The company bought the land for just more than $2 million, and are seeking Chapter 100 bonds, an incentive that abates some property taxes.
Company president Scott McGinty said he hoped to hire around 100 people when they open the facility in 2018. AOD currently operates farms and other facilities in Colorado and Texas, and hopes its Columbia facility will give them better access across the country. The city’s placement near Interstate 70 was attractive, McGinty said, and hoped to bring in as many as 150 light manufacturing jobs within five years. AOD would ship its dairy products, like store brand organic milk at places like WalMart.
Some raised concerns with AOD’s farming style. Scott Dye with Socially Responsible Agriculture Project said the company’s feeding and grazing practices did not meet the legal requirements to get organic certification from the federal government. The USDA has certified AOD as an organic operation since 2003. ABC 17 News reported on a class-action lawsuit settlement the company entered into involving its advertising as an organic product.
Council members all agreed that the influx of jobs was a much-needed asset to Columbia. AOD estimated it would pay workers around $42,000 a year, with benefits. Councilman Ian Thomas lamented the secrecy the project went through leading up to Monday’s vote. However, he admitted he supported the “clawback” written into the contract, where the city would take $500,000 of the land purchase and return it to the company if they met certain employment marks each year.
Councilman Michael Trapp said the new manufacturing jobs would help reduce poverty in the city. Trapp utilized the percentage of students that qualify for free and reduced lunch at Columbia Public Schools – 46 percent in 2016 – as an indicator for the need in town for families to get a living wage job.
“The fact that our African American unemployment rate is several times higher than the general unemployment rate, it can also be laid at the feet of the decline of manufacturing jobs,” Trapp said.
