Iberville turns Dow gift into a diamond

J. Mitchell Ourso Jr. makes no secret of lberville Parish's dependence on industry. That's why Ourso, the Iberville Parish president, is so pleased that Grand Island, Neb.-based Diamond Plastics Corp. is choosing to build a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe manufacturing plant there instead of next door

Employing about 40 people, most of them to be hired locally, the 65,000- square-foot facility will sit on 40 acres the parish is giving to Diamond for the purpose of establishing an industrial park. The land is part of a 100-acre parcel donated to the parish by The Dow Chemical Co. on the condition that the parish have a PVC pipe plant at the site within two years.

"It will give us an opportunity for middle-of-the-line type jobs with good benefits for the unskilled person," Our so said. "We're very excited about having this kind of industry. It's a very, very clean industry, with no stacks and no emissions."

The Diamond facility, for which ground was broken May 18, will be part of a manufacturing triangle that includes nearby plants owned by Dow and Tokyo-based Shintech Inc. The presence of Shintech was the main reason Diamond decided to locate here, Ourso said.

Shintech supplies Diamond's four existing U.S. plants with the PVC resin used to manufacture the final product and will, also supply Diamond's Iberville plant. Dow pipes the raw materials for PVC underground to Shintech, which will pipe the resin underground to Diamond.

Besides Nebraska, the company also has PVC pipe plants in Lubbock, Texas; Macon, Ga.; Golconda, Nev.; and Muncie, Ind. Production at the Iberville plant is expected to begin late this year or in early spring 2002. The facility will operate 24 hours a day once it is up and running, Ourso said.

"This is the first time in lberville Parish history that we'll finally see the end result of a product made here," he noted. "We have around 13 industries making all sorts of chemicals that are shipped in and that are shipped out. Now we'll see the final result."

Diamond will pay for an access road to the facility, Ourso said, though Dow "asked (the parish council) to consider" building a railroad spur within two years. He said the council is hoping to obtain outside funding to build the spur, which has an estimated construction cost of $1.5 million.

"I certainly don't want to use taxpayers' dollars," Ourso said. "I'm going to try to do it with (state) Department of Economic Development funds or federal funds, not parish funds."

Though Iberville Parish once depended completely on agriculture, oil and gas, timber and fishing, today roughly half its tax revenues come from the chemical industry, he noted.

"How could we diversify? Where would we go?" Ourso asked. "We're industry-oriented-that's what pushes the buttons around here at this time."

He acknowledged that some environmentally minded parish residents aren't convinced the new plant will be non-polluting, though Ourso insisted that a recent visit to Diamond's Macon facility proved to him that nothing hazardous is involved in the operation. PVC pipe that doesn't meet quality tests is recycled back into the manufacturing process, he said.

Ourso said he's in no position to second-guess state regulatory agencies such as the Department of Environmental Quality and the Department of Natural Resources over who is allowed to set up a manufacturing facility and who isn't. He added that he doesn't think the state's environmental agencies would permit an industrial operation unless it were safe.

"I'm here to protect the parish and the people I represent," he said. "Economic concerns are one thing, but the public safety of the people I represent comes first. When the proof is in that it's doing some harm, I would be the first one to go to the parish council and say, "We don't need this here.'"

He compared the parish's past efforts to market itself-before it had an industrial park-to trying to sell a Cadillac without actually having one on the lot. As a result of a shortage of available land, Ourso said, the parish has missed out on past opportunities to lure industry, such as when Shintech elected to locate across the line in West Baton Rouge Parish.

"Now we have the Cadillac," he said.