Sprinkler maker will bring 300 jobs to Pickens County

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The Reliable Automatic Sprinkler Co. Inc. said it will relocate all of its manufacturing and product development and part of its distribution from Westchester County, New York, to the Pickens County Commerce Park along U.S. 123.

The new plant will employ 350, with 50 of those likely to relocate from New York, said Frank J. Fee III, Reliable's president.

The company's move south is welcome news in Pickens County, where the economy has been battered in recent years by job losses in the textiles industry and the collapse of Carolina Investors Inc.

"I know people who cannot pay their rent, who have lost their homes, who have lost their cars, who have not been able to adequately provide for their families all because they lost jobs," said Luther Johnson Jr., a Liberty businessman and retired school principal.

Reliable said it plans to construct a 300,000-square-foot building on 56 acres in the industrial park by the middle of 2005 and start making sprinklers there in late 2005 or early 2006.

Starting pay for production workers will be $9 an hour, said Fee, whose grandfather founded Reliable in 1920. He said the company will also need to hire other kinds of workers such as engineers, supervisors and information technology specialists.

Gov. Mark Sanford and county officials are scheduled to announce the $30 million investment today in a 10:30 a.m. ceremony at the county administration building in Pickens.

Ray Farley, economic development director for Pickens County, said Reliable is the first industry the county has recruited since Sulzer Process Pumps put a plant in Easley 15 years ago. The county hasn't been competitive in recruiting industry because it didn't have a Class A industrial park until recently, he said.

"It's these kinds of projects that Pickens County has been missing out on the last 20 years because it didn't have the kind of infrastructure for this kind of commerce to take place on," Farley said. "Now it does. We look for more projects like this one to come down the pike."

Norman Langston, a County Council member from the Liberty area, said there is "no way to express how important it is to this county, especially the way it's been the past three years. I'm so overjoyed I don't even know how to express myself. We've worked a long hard time on this. Nearly two years. We had to keep it under wraps, but it's coming full circle for us."

To lure Reliable, Pickens County offered an incentives package that included $2.5 million from a county reserves fund. Fee said that money will be used to help prepare the factory site and construct the building.

The incentives package also included a 20-year property tax break for Reliable and a $1 million state grant to pay for infrastructure such as roads and water and sewer service.

Langston said the benefits are worth the costs.

"We've been dragging our feet for so many years," he said. "This is just the tip of the iceberg, I think. There's more things in the works, and I think it will snowball for us. One thing brings on another."

Fee said Reliable also considered moving to Virginia and North Carolina and that those states offered competitive incentives packages.

He said the company chose South Carolina in part because of worker training available through Tri-County Technical College in Pendleton. Another factor was a visit by members of the Pickens County Council to Reliable headquarters in Mt. Vernon, New York, last spring, Fee said.

"That was very impressive," he said.

The 500-employee Reliable sells about $125 million worth of fire sprinklers and system components each year and is one of the leading companies in the industry, Fee said. He said the company's work force in New York isn't represented by a union. Its headquarters will move to Elmsford, N.Y., as part of the current restructuring, he said.

Textiles companies that have closed plants or shed jobs in Pickens County since the beginning of 2001 include Mayfair Mills, Saco Lowell, Greenwood Mills, Alice Manufacturing Co. and Central Textiles.

The county's unemployment rate was 6 percent in December, six-tenths of a percent higher than it was a year earlier but slightly lower than the current statewide rate of 6.1 percent, according to the latest data from the state Employment Security Commission.

But about 20,000 Pickens County residents commute outside of the county to work, said Ron Harrison, chairman of the County Council.

"It's important for our tax base and our quality of life that we provide employment opportunities at all levels here in Pickens County," he said.

Pickens County lost a key employer in 1996 when AT&T Corp. closed a computer factory just outside Liberty. The 310,000-square-foot building that housed the factory — opened by NCR Corp. in 1980 — sat vacant until recently, when TechTronic Industries, maker of Ryobi power tools, moved a small distribution operation into it.

Pickens-based Carolina Investors and HomeGold Financial Inc., its Columbia-based parent company, filed for bankruptcy last spring, reporting they were unable to repay $275 million due more than 8,000 investors, most of whom live in Pickens and surrounding counties.