General Tire facility gets new lease on life. - Waco Tribune-Herald (Waco, TX)

Byline: J.B. Smith

Feb. 5--As a maintenance man for General Tire in the 1970s and 80s, Joe Dickau got used to long hours, hard work and the deafening clang of machinery. Working in a sprawling building where temperatures could approach 140 degrees, he often would end a day with his work clothes drenched in sweat and his skin blackened with tire grime.

Still, a General Tire job was a job to be proud of. It meant union wages, six weeks of vacation, health, dental and vision benefits and lucrative overtime. Dickau made $13.10 an hour and often could take home $1,000 a week.

'It was one of the better jobs in Waco,' said Dickau, now 64. 'The pay was real good, and it had great benefits.'

It's been 20 years since Waco lost General Tire, its biggest industrial employer with 1,400 workers and a $42 million payroll. The closure put Waco's economy into a slump and caused hundreds of workers to move away.

Last week's announcement that a big-name tenant, Caterpillar Logistics Services, will occupy half the 2 million-square-foot building is a sign of how much has changed since then.

Cat Logistics's huge new distribution center will require only 40 jobs, a small fraction of the employment of General Tire. But community leaders say the good news is that the economy has long since recuperated from the closing and is healthier today.

In the two decades since the closure, Waco has seen the development of a broader-based economy that encompasses everything from candy to aerospace.

'Waco's economy is so much more diverse today,' said David Lacy, a banker and chairman of the Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce. 'Diversity in the business world is always a good thing. You're less dependent on any one particular industry. You spread your risks of any one of them closing.'

Chamber officials said the Caterpillar project represents another step in Waco's steady march toward healthy economic development.

The project is an outgrowth of Waco's previous relationship with Caterpillar, the nation's 55th largest company.

Caterpillar built a manufacturing facility in Waco in the late 1990s that now makes buckets for earth-moving machines. That investment paved the way for the distribution center project, Cat Logistics spokeswoman Liva Vosekalna said.

Caterpillar plans to use the facility to centralize its international distribution system for work tools and attachments made in Waco and elsewhere. That will allow the company to get its products to dealers and customers faster. It will serve not only the United States but all of North and South America and even overseas markets such as Australia.

'Dealers are going to be extremely happy about the change,' Vosekalna said.

Waco was chosen in a site selection process with a geographical scope that extended as far north as Oklahoma City. Vosekalna said Waco is in a 'geographical sweet spot' and has a climate that allows for outdoor as well as indoor storage.

The deal was approved and announced by the Caterpillar corporate board Friday. A lease agreement is expected to be signed this week, pending approval of $400,000 in incentives from the city of Waco and McLennan County.

Bland Cromwell, a broker with Coldwell Banker Jim Stewart Realtors, began working on the deal last April. He said Cat Logistics had considered building the facility on its spacious site in West Waco.

Cromwell said he persuaded officials to consider the former General Tire plant, the largest available industrial building in Waco and one of the largest in Texas.

The company will take over 975,000 square feet of space in the form of large interconnected warehouses that were added to the plant in the 1970s. The Clifton Robinson family, which owns the huge complex, leased out most of the newer warehousing space until the early 2000s, Cromwell said.

'Then 9/11 just flattened it,' Cromwell said. 'What we were always looking for was a big user who could take all these units. . . . This is so much a part of the history of the town, everyone is excited to see it come back to use.'

In addition to the Cat Logistics center, 100,000 square feet of the complex has been converted into a factory for Clarke Products, a plumbing supply company that will employ 60. Cromwell also expects 350,000 square feet to be used for a tire distribution facility.

The older brick buildings, including the large three-story facility visible from South Loop, remain unused, but chamber officials hope to see renewed interest in them.

'That's something we're really interested in,' said Sarah Roberts, the chamber vice president who worked on the Cat Logistics deal. 'Anytime you get investment into a facility, it's a catalyst for other work.'

General Tire, based in Akron, Ohio, began building the facility in 1944 with federal financing to meet the military's demand. The plant originally made military tires, large rubber rafts and rubber barrage balloons for World War II. The plant continued as an engine of Waco's booming postwar economy and brought with it a powerful union, United Rubber Workers Local 312.

For four decades it was a dependable source of jobs, promising a solid living even to young people straight out of high school.

But by the early 1980s, global competition in the tire industry and the rise of radial tires put the squeeze on the Waco plant, which made bias-ply tires. During a strike in 1982, the company threatened to close the plant altogether, until workers accepted a wage cut.

Still, the announcement in 1985 that the plant would shut down was a bombshell for workers and the community as a whole.

Baylor University economist Tom Kelly studied the closure and what happened to the displaced workers. He found that about a third accepted early retirement, a third moved away from Waco and a third found jobs in the local economy.

Dickau, the maintenance worker, accepted a buyout and started his own business as a welder before returning later to oversee maintenance at the former tire facility.

'(The closure) hurt a lot of people,' he said. 'Myself, I was fortunate that I had a trade I could fall back on.'

During the same period, Texas hit a recession and several Waco firms closed, including Datapont, Levi Strauss and Texas Coffin Co., costing the community about 850 jobs. Kelly said that had a ripple effect on housing and other sectors of the economy.

'In the mid-'80s what was happening was not just manufacturing jobs going away, but the whole Texas economy was looking pretty bad,' he said.

But the seeds of a recovery already were planted. In 1985, Electrospace Systems Inc. completed an airplane modification plant, which has since developed into the L-3 Communications plant that today employs 1,706 people. Other newcomers include M&M Mars (now Masterfoods) and Allergan.

McLennan County's manufacturing employment has dropped 5 percent since 1990, but Kelly said that's better than the national average in an age when manufacturing jobs have fallen prey to foreign outsourcing and automation.

'We've had a lot of success in attracting industry since General Tire closed,' Kelly said.

The manufacturing employment sector will improve markedly with the opening this year of the Sanderson Farms poultry processing center, which will employ 1,300.

Kelly said Caterpillar's expansion into the General Tire building bodes well for Waco.

'I think it's a really good step to see our local manufacturers making more of an investment in our economy,' he said. 'It's a good statement to other companies that they're satisfied with our business environment, that they're happy campers.'

Dickau said he's glad to see that the former General Tire facility will be well-used again.

'It's a hell of a building,' he said. 'It just needs a good cleaning.'

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