Mebane city council members were told Monday night about a major new company that is planning to occupy a 375,000-square-foot facility that is now under construction on the eastern edge of Mebane – across the county line in western Orange County.
Justin Parker, vice president of real estate development for Al Neyer, the development company that is building the facility, told Mebane city council members Monday night that the tenant for the facility is Thermo Fisher Scientific, a Fortune 100 company.
Thermo Fisher Scientific announced last week in conjunction with announcing its third quarter earnings that “in partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense,” the company is “building a new manufacturing site in North Carolina to ensure reliable domestic production of pipette tips which are used for liquid handling in research and diagnostic laboratories.”
The new, state-of-the-art, energy-efficient manufacturing facility will specialize in making plastic pipettes, slender tubes attached to or incorporating a bulb, for transferring or measuring out small quantities of liquid, especially in a laboratory. Some of its applications are used in testing for Covid-19, Parker explained.
Thermo Fisher Scientific announced it September that it had received a $192.5 million contract for the U.S. Department of Defense “to ensure reliable domestic production of pipette tips, which are used within research and diagnostic labs to dispense precise amounts of liquid,” the company summarizes.
According to that September release, the company will “co-invest with the U.S. government in building a new, state-of-the-art, energy efficient manufacturing facility for pipette tips, which are used in vital disease research and in high volumes of processing of diagnostic tests nationally, including COVID-19, during the pandemic.”
While Thermo Fisher Scientific did not specify a location for its North Carolina site – neither in the third quarter report or in its announcement of the DOD contract – Parker suggested that the intended site is, in fact, in Mebane. He told The Alamance News in a brief interview after the city council meeting that he expects Thermo Fisher Scientific to make its own announcement soon.
Parker estimated that the building will be ready for occupancy next summer, around August 2022.
He did not specify the company’s jobs impact other than to say it would bring “hundreds of new jobs” to Mebane.
Parker also said Thermo Fisher Scientific’s preferred design is slightly different from that envisioned by Al Neyer, significantly reducing the number of loading docks – and, ultimately, the number of tractor trailer trucks coming into and out of the site.
Parker made his comments at the beginning of a presentation about another of Al Neyer’s proposed projects, for another almost 1 million feet in warehouse space in five separate buildings on about 128 acres between Buckhorn and West Ten roads behind the Petro truck stop at the Buckhorn Road exit. [See separate story.]
Parker also noted that a second manufacturing/distribution center on the first 46-acre tract – on the southeast corner of Buckhorn Road and West Ten Road that the city council approved earlier this year, with 205,000, square feet – has not yet been leased or otherwise committed.
During his presentation before the planning board last month, Parker made the point that the then-unnamed company was one “in name, brand, and function, that other companies tend to cluster around.”
He did not specify the company’s jobs impact other than to say it would bring “hundreds of new jobs” to Mebane.
Parker also said Thermo Fisher Scientific’s preferred design is slightly different from that envisioned by Al Neyer, significantly reducing the number of loading docks – and, ultimately, the number of tractor trailer trucks coming into and out of the site.
Parker made his comments at the beginning of a presentation about another of Al Neyer’s proposed projects, for another almost 1 million feet in warehouse space in five separate buildings on about 128 acres between Buckhorn and West Ten roads behind the Petro truck stop at the Buckhorn Road exit. [See separate story.]
Parker also noted that a second manufacturing/distribution center on the first 46-acre tract – on the southeast corner of Buckhorn Road and West Ten Road that the city council approved earlier this year, with 205,000, square feet – has not yet been leased or otherwise committed.
During his presentation before the planning board last month, Parker made the point that the then-unnamed company was one “in name, brand, and function, that other companies tend to cluster around.”
Hint at upcoming announcement: https://alamancenews.com/developer-fortune-100-company-almost-lined-up-for-mebane-site-in-orange-county/
