Former Grand Rapids (MN) mill to become industrial park

The former Ainsworth Lumber mill in Grand Rapids will be converted into an industrial park for up to 10 small businesses when Itasca Economic Development Corp. completes the purchase of 223 acres.

The site with about 400,000 square feet of industrial space will be reconstructed into individual parcels to attract smaller, differentiating businesses. After a $5 million reconstruction is completed next summer, the Itasca Eco Industrial Park will have about 200,000 square feet of industrial space and 90 acres available for tenants. The purchase price was not disclosed, but the deal should be finalized before 2010.

“This site has the right infrastructure and a strategic location, the necessary ingredients to support manufacturing operations that will serve growing renewable energy markets and other customers,” Diane Weber, interim president of the group, said in a news release.

One possible tenant, a wood biomass fuel producer based outside Minnesota that has signed a nonbinding letter of intent, could bring 30 direct and 40 indirect jobs to the park, Weber told the News Tribune. She added that the goal is to replace the nearly 200 jobs lost when Ainsworth closed.

“We will focus on renewable energies and component manufacturers or biomass, green building products or environmentally-friendly products of any kind,” she said.

Ainsworth closed the mill in September 2006, putting about 190 employees out of work. Ainsworth made about 390 million square feet of oriented strand board out of local timber per year. The closure was made permanent in August 2008.

Weber said about nine out of 10 times perspective companies that toured the site found it too big for their purposes.

“We’ve been showing the site since January, and as we were bringing prospects in the common theme was, ‘It’s too big for us. We like it, but it’s too big for us.’ And companies don’t want to be real estate developers,” Weber said. “We saw a role for us that if we wanted to get the site back into production use quickly and didn’t want it to deteriorate to the point where it’s not attractive to anybody, we better play the role of real estate developer. We will acquire it, repurpose it and then get it back into the private, for-profit sector as soon as possible.”

Other groups involved included Area Partnership for Economic Expansion, the Blandin Foundation, the city of Grand Rapids and Iron Range Resources.