Economic development leaders in Metro Augusta are celebrating the recent series of major companies coming to the area, creating hundreds of new jobs.
While those jobs have been in the spotlight, there is a quieter, even larger, job growth bubbling just under the headlines.
Augusta Business Daily spoke with Cal Wray, President of the Augusta Economic Development Authority (AEDA), Will Williams, President and CEO of Western SC Economic Development Partnership, and Austin Stacy, Executive Director of the Development Authority of Burke County (DABC), about the thousands of jobs that will need to be filled before new companies are up and running.
The first step is creating workspaces for the more than 1,300 new jobs announced within the past two years. That means hiring construction workers across all building trades to build office locations or manufacturing facilities as needed.
Many of the companies, including GF Casting Solutions in the Augusta Corporate Park, Meta in Aiken County’s Sage Mill Industrial Park, and TMC Transformers and Ritz Instrument coming to the Burke County Industrial Park, require the construction of new facilities.
“I think for Burke County specifically, it’s going to have a great positive impact,” said Stacy.
Stacy understands the correlation between companies bringing new jobs to the county and the impact on employment in the building trades. Bechtel said the construction of Units Three and Four at Plant Vogtle created about 9,000 on-site jobs during peak construction.
“We have a lot of local businesses that are going to feel the economic impact in the short term, because it’ll be cheaper for TMC, or whoever else decides to build, to utilize a local company,” he said. “We have a whole host of individual-owned trucking companies that will be able to haul dirt in and out. We have contractors, plumbers, electricians, everybody that you would need to build a facility.”
Wray anticipates thousands of construction jobs created to build CF Casting Solutions, PureCycle Technologies, Inc., and the next phase of the Aurubis Richmond, LLC plant.
“Probably 400 to 500 construction jobs ongoing, two contractors out on site with Gray Construction and Evans General Contractors, as they complete phase two, already looking at phase three,” he said. “GF is getting ready to kick off. Evans General Contractors has that project as well. They already have their trailers set up out there for construction trailers. You’re going to end up with probably 300-plus construction jobs out there at any given time. PureCycle Technologies, Inc. will kick off in December with their grading work as they move on into the building of their facility.”
To put that into perspective, those construction jobs at Aurubis alone represent roughly twice the 250 permanent jobs Aurubis anticipates on-site when phases one and two are operating.
Wray pointed out those are just the projects underway, or on the way, in the Augusta Corporate Park. He sees Augusta in the midst of a construction boom.
“You had the Standard Aero project, which is under construction now. RW Allen’s building the hangar out at the airport,” he said. “Syensqo has their expansion, you’ve got that project kicking off, you’ll have construction jobs there. You’ve got other smaller projects at many of our manufacturers. So, I would say for the next year and a half, two years, with all of these different projects, it is going to be a lot of new money coming into the economy.”
In Aiken County, developers are looking at two major projects, one ongoing and the other about to kick off.
“It is a winner’s problem,” Williams told ABD. “Meta will have, probably sometime in the first quarter of next year, they will wind up with about 1,000 people on-site building, and that’ll be probably a two-year build. That’s going to be electricians, that’s going to be steel workers, all those kinds of things. Meanwhile, the Pit mission at the Savannah River Site continues to build up. They’ve got contractors on site now, but they will really hit their peak in 2026 with 3,500.”
SRS officials anticipate transforming the failed Mixed Oxide (MOX) facility into Pit production will mean more than 9,000 construction jobs overall.
Williams said one drawback if contractors and construction companies need to hire workers from outside Metro Augusta is where to put them, even in the short term.
“Obviously there’s not a lot of housing, not a lot of hotels, so that’s kind of a strain on resources,” he explained. “We’ve been trying to help folks understand the possibilities of having areas where RVs could be set up and all that. So, we have, there’s some support.”
Burke County is also looking at possibilities, including attracting workers to move to the county to work on the build but then deciding to stay.
“Two months ago, we engaged in a contract with Retail Strategies where they will be helping us recruit retail market individuals to come here to Burke as well,” he said. “So, we know that naturally, these project announcements are going to attract retail, but we also understand that you got to put your best foot forward and also seek some of those opportunities out, which we are currently and actively doing.”
The spate of announcements has Burke County in a dilemma Augusta is also facing. The TMC and Ritz announcements in Burke County, along with GF Castings in Richmond County leave just a few small tracts available in their respective development parks. Both AEDA and DABC are looking for new, undeveloped areas with the possibility of creating a so-called “mega site” that will straddle both counties.
Hiring workers for these major projects is one thing, but creates the question of where to find, or train, skilled workers. ABD spoke with technical schools and the local building trades unions and will examine those challenges in our Wednesday story.
