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MidAmerica’s Business Costs Attract Industry
Why should the automotive industry locate in MidAmerica Industrial Park? The better question is: Why wouldn’t auto industries locate there?
“We are an extremely diversified park with industries from food processing to paper products to plastics,” says Don Berger, marketing director for the park. “Now, with all the automotive assembly plants on this side of the country, MidAmerica has emerged a strategic location for yet another industry - automotive.”
The park is located 40 miles from Tulsa, Oklahoma, one of the top 60 metropolitan areas in the U.S., and is situated at the intersection of two major highways: U.S. 69 and U.S. 412. They don’t call these roads the “NAFTA Transportation Corridor” and the “Wal-Mart Expressway” for nothing.
MidAmerica is well known as a regional logistics center that is served by 70 trucking companies on a daily basis. Two have terminals onsite. The park is equidistant from each coast to allow tenants to reach over 60 percent of U.S. markets via truck on a same-day basis. Union Pacific also serves MidAmerica industries with lead rails that traverse the park.
Industries can also use the low-cost barge transportation at a major port on an ice-free inland waterway navigation system. And the Tulsa International Airport, which is home to a variety of airfreight companies and forwarders for expedited domestic and international shipments, is just 30 minutes from the park.
With 9,000 acres of land, MidAmerica is the largest industrial park in Oklahoma and the largest rural park in the nation. The park is designated as a state enterprise zone and a Foreign Trade Zone and has multiple greenfield sites that can accommodate plant construction footprints that exceed 1,000 acres. Fast-track permitting cuts the red tape and allows construction to begin in days rather than months and internal financing is available for land and building.
“Our amenities are very attractive to industry,” Berger says. “The park owns the Regional Business Airport and the water and wastewater treatment facilities, so our cost of doing business is low here. In fact, if you compare our water and wastewater structure to other communities across the nation you’ll find that we are one of the lowest.”
Three electric utilities have onsite power generation facilities and natural gas providers that also offer highly competitive rates to park industries. And MidAmerica boasts zero outages and zero interruptions from two of its substations. The park’s telecommunications network is state-of-the-art with offerings that range from a new high-speed DSL connectivity to SONET-ring protected fiber-optic broadband networks and wireless service.
Two workforce development institutions have training facilities onsite. The OSU-Okmulgee center, a branch of Oklahoma State University, specializes in skill development for high-productivity advancing or leading edge technologies. Often described as Oklahoma’s secret weapon, the free Training for Industry Program takes place onsite at the Northeast Technology Centers. MidAmerica boasts a potential workforce of over 280,000 people within a 30-mile radius and 848,000 within a 40-mile radius.
Maybe that’s why Fortune and Global 500 firms like SYSCO, Georgia-Pacific, Siemens AG, ConocoPhillips and ChevronTexaco call MidAmerica home.
For more information about MidAmerican Industrial Park, call Don Berger at 918-825-3500, send e-mail to donb@maip.com or visit www.maip.com.
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