Word: lea
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Seaboard Corp., a giant of agribusiness with headquarters in Merriam, Kans., and controlled out of Chestnut Hill, Mass. Seaboard officials announced that they would restart the shuttered pork-processing plant that had once been the town's largest employer--if the city offered a little help. Albert Lea responded by giving Seaboard a $2.9 million low-interest loan and a special deal on its sewer bill and grading and paving parking lots for employees. And before long, the plant reopened, and several hundred workers were back...
...when the process began by which the fairy tale turned into a very bad dream. Just four years later, in 1994, Seaboard phased out the plant and moved its hog-slaughtering operations to another town 800 miles away, which came up with an even larger corporate-welfare package. Albert Lea was left saddled with debt, higher utility bills and an abandoned slaughterhouse. The entire episode, says City Manager Paul Sparks, was a "disaster...
...closeup view of Seaboard, let's begin with Albert Lea. For most of this century, Wilson Foods operated that pork plant and was the town's largest employer. Wilson fell on hard times in the early 1980s, cut workers' average annual pay from $22,200 to $16,600 and eventually sold the plant to Farmstead Foods. In turn, that company went belly-up a few years later, after it lost its biggest customer--Wilson. Then, in December 1990, just as workers were receiving the last of their unemployment checks, Seaboard appeared...
...more than $3 million Albert Lea handed out to help reopen the plant represented only the latest installment in corporate-welfare payouts. Because hog killing created serious pollution problems, Albert Lea earlier had kicked in $3.4 million to build a wastewater-treatment plant devoted mostly to servicing the pig factory. The hogs had your help as well: the Federal Government contributed $25.5 million, while the state of Minnesota gave $5.1 million. Total cost of the sewage plant: $34 million. The city also built new roads and water lines to the plant, built a parking lot and came up with...
Hoffman, Seaboard's vice president of finance, took note during that luncheon of the stream of government aid: "We're especially grateful to the state of Minnesota and the city of Albert Lea, who together since 1984 have supplied literally millions of dollars in the form of grants, tax incentives and loans to the facility. They had a lot of confidence in it... Truly this has been a lesson in economic development...