As Fayetteville and Cumberland County officials try to persuade American Titanium Metal to build a $1.3 billion titanium recycling plant here, they can look to South Carolina and their own history for cautionary lessons.
From 2008 until 2022, another company sought to open a titanium manufacturing plant in Laurens County, South Carolina. That company filed for bankruptcy on May 1.
In 2006 and 2007, a $200 million ethanol plant was proposed to be built north of the Fayetteville city limits — on the same property that today is being considered for the titanium plant. Plans for the ethanol plant were canceled following intense local opposition, The Fayetteville Observer reported in 2007.
In 2015, controversy erupted when poultry producer Sanderson Farms proposed a $95 million chicken processing plant for a county industrial park on the southeast side of Fayetteville. It would have employed 975 people, The Fayetteville Observer reported. Following opposition from residents and elected officials, Sanderson Farms took its project to neighboring Robeson County.
American Titanium Metal and its proposed titanium reclamation facility for Cumberland County will be different, said Robert Van Geons, head of the Fayetteville/Cumberland County Economic Development Corporation.
The startup titanium recycling company being courted by Fayetteville and Cumberland County promises to hire 300 people initially and pay them an average of $120,000 a year. Most of those workers would be trained through local colleges, Van Geons said.
Fayetteville and Cumberland County would buy the 120 acres that American Titanium Metal is eyeing for its plant, off Ramsey Street behind Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. If everything goes well, the company has plans to expand, adding an additional 100 to 150 jobs, though a timeline has not been specified for that projection.
The company is not expected to be a big polluter — it needs only a minor state air quality permit, and any wastewater discharge would be monitored through the Fayetteville Public Works Commission’s sewer system, Van Geons said.
What’s more, American Titanium Metal seeks $1.3 billion in bonds and millions of dollars worth of incentives from Fayetteville and Cumberland County. The incentives would be performance based, meaning the company would have to meet stringent objectives before being rewarded. If it failed to meet those objectives, the city, county, state and taxpayers would be out nothing, Van Geons said.
“It sounds almost too good to be true,” said Lisette Rodriguez, a Fayetteville activist and a member of Common Cause of North Carolina governmental accountability organization. Rodriguez said she opposes the plant without more information being released.
The titanium manufacturing plant once proposed in Laurens County, South Carolina, never materialized after 14 years of on-again, off-again negotiations. That deal proved just too good to be true.
Van Geons said officials with American Titanium Metal — the company proposing to locate in Cumberland County — told him they have no connection with the company that had an eye on Laurens County. Van Geons was not working in Fayetteville when Sanderson Farms and the ethanol plant were considering locating here.
Broken expectations in South Carolina
In 2008, startup company American Titanium Works approached Laurens County and state officials with a proposal to manufacture rolled titanium sheets at a plant it hoped to build using $400 million in bonds. The company said then that it would hire 320 people.
Jonathan Coleman, head of the Laurens County Development Corporation, had high hopes in August 2008 that American Titanium Works would settle there.
“By working together, Laurens County Corporation and Greenville Area Development Corporation were able to bring substantial investment with advanced manufacturing technology that will not only benefit Laurens and Greenville Counties, but will also positively impact the entire state,” Coleman was quoted in media outlets at the time.
But the proposal was being made during America’s Great Recession, and Coleman’s hopes and efforts were dashed.
“September came along and the financial crash and all of their financing fell apart,” Coleman told CityView in an interview.
Four years later, the company’s chief executive, Thomas F. Sax, was back with an almost identical proposal.
In 2012, The Spartanburg Herald-Journal newspaper reported that Sax promised during a ceremony that the company would provide 300 jobs at the plant, another 50 at a nearby Clemson University technical center and 500 related to plant construction. At the time, the South Carolina Research Authority and other nonprofits pledged to provide the company with $430,000 as bridge funding to allow it to re-enter capital markets.
Once again, the company’s plans fell through.
“It just always seemed like there was always something, and when they would tell us it was close, they were, you know, next quarter and then they would have an excuse,” Coleman said. “Whether it be geopolitical issues or financial issues or economic issues or whatever.”
CityView’s efforts to reach Sax for this story were unsuccessful.
Ten years later, in 2022, the company returned a third time with the same plan and the same request for at least $400 million in bond funding. A story in the Laurens County Advertiser says the South Carolina Jobs-Economic Development Authority asked the South Carolina government to issue bonds to lend the company $400 million.
“Finally, they went straight to the state and tried to get the state to give them all these bonds and stuff and the state just basically told them, ‘No, thank you.’ And so it just kind of went away,” Coleman said.
On May 1, American Titanium Works filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Court documents show the company owes its creditors about $50 million and has assets totaling slightly less than $41,000.
Coleman said the county and the state didn’t lose any money in its efforts to land American Titanium Works because all of the incentives were performance based.
All that was lost in South Carolina, Coleman said, was a lot of time and effort.
Unlike in Cumberland County, Laurens County did not propose to buy the land for the company, or hook it up to public water and sewer. In all, Cumberland County and Fayetteville each plan to spend $535,00 on the water and sewer connections alone.
Nondisclosure agreement
In an interview with CityView, Van Geons said he had heard about the problems of the titanium plant in Laurens County but didn’t know much about them. Later in the day, he called to say he had spoken to an executive with the company looking to locate here and was assured that it had no ties to American Titanium Works.
Van Geons said his organization has entered a nondisclosure agreement that prevents him and other city and county officials from disclosing the main players of American Titanium Metal or other aspects of the company.
Nondisclosure agreements are common in such endeavors.
Citing North Carolina’s open records laws, CityView has asked for emails between Van Geons and city and county officials that include the word “titanium” in an effort to determine more about American Titanium Metal. Google searches come up empty for the company, which was established in September.
Although the nondisclosure agreement prevents him from naming the company’s executives, Van Geons said the titanium plant could be a great fit for the county.
“I think if we’re able to secure this project, it really sets the tone for where we’re moving as a community,” he said. “I believe that we can be a center for applied innovation. And I think that this fits perfectly into that at the midway point between aviation and defense industry jobs, along with medical devices and supporting next generation technologies.
“I think it would leverage many of the assets and companies we have here today, from defense contractors, to drone R&D companies, to working with the folks in medical research with Womack and Fort Liberty. Just the opportunity to draw customers and parts of the overall supply chain that utilize the titanium here would have incredible returns on our investment.”
(Womack Army Medical Center is the hospital at Fort Liberty.)
Residents’ concerns
Last month, the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners gave preliminary approval for the county’s Industrial Facility and Pollution Control Financing Authority to issue up to $1.3 billion in bonds for American Titanium Metal.
The Fayetteville City Council and the county also have approved incentive packages for the company totaling millions of dollars. Only one elected official, City Councilman Mario Benavente, voted against the incentives.
Benavente said that although he trusts Van Geons, he heard the concerns of the people who spoke against the incentives at a public hearing on the day the council approved them. Benavente said he wants those concerns addressed before moving forward.
Among those who spoke at the public hearing was Rodriguez, the Fayetteville activist and Common Cause member.
Rodriguez told CityView afterward she has concerns about the proposed plant’s impact on the environment. It would be less than a mile from the Cape Fear River, which regulators say has been contaminated downstream with “forever” chemicals known as PFAS by the DuPont and later Chemours chemical plant south of Fayetteville.
Sharon Martin, a spokesperson for the state Dept. of Environmental Quality, said the DEQ has not received an application from the company for an air quality permit. Martin said the Fayetteville Public Works Commission would issue a sewer pretreatment permit for the company, which would then be submitted to the DEQ for review.
Rodriguez also wondered how American Titanium Metal would be able to pay its workers such hefty salaries.
“I have a very, very hard time believing that they would be paying manufacturing jobs that pay $120k, especially in Fayetteville, when our median per capita income is only around $30,000 a year,” Rodriguez said.
She said one of her biggest worries is that so little is publicly known about American Titanium Metal.
“There was not really any public information available on this company, so it sounds like it might be, in my opinion, a holding company, which means we don’t really know who’s running the company, who will be overseeing it,” Rodriguez said. “Have they been successful in building plants like this in other cities? And have those jobs that were promised, has that actually come to fruition?”
Van Geons said that, to his knowledge, American Titanium Metal does not have a parent company.
“We’re going to keep looking and keep evaluating all the information we get and that we receive as we go forward,” he said.
Van Geons: Company’s decision coming soon
Van Geons is convinced that American Titanium Metal would be a great partner in Cumberland County and that it will live up to its promises. If it doesn’t, he said, only the people who invested in the company would be hurt financially.
As of June 11, the city and county have made their local incentive offer, Van Geons said. If selected, the parties would move towards formal agreements. The state Dept. of Commerce also reviews such projects to determine any incentives to be offered, he said.
“We always look to our friends at Commerce to evaluate, you know, to do their full due diligence on it, and we would too, but there’s a reason why all of our stuff is performance based,” he said.
Van Geons couldn’t put a timetable on when American Titanium Metal will decide whether to locate here. The company is still exploring sites in other states; Van Geons said that he expects a decision “sooner rather than later,” and that “we’re doing everything we can to get our offer in front of them.”
He brushes off concerns that the county could be getting a company that would harm the environment. Two years before Van Geons started working in Fayetteville in 2017, a chicken processing company called Sanderson Farms wanted to build a plant in the county’s industrial park.
After much debate, and complaints from residents, the county and the city offered Sanderson Farms incentive packages, only to be told that the company was no longer interested. Sanderson Farms eventually found a home in Robeson County.
In 2007, a Seattle startup company called E85 Inc. wanted to build a $200 million ethanol plant on the same property that American Titanium Metal is exploring. The company pulled out after residents complained that it would smell, create excess truck traffic and lower property values.
In no way, Van Geons vowed, does American Titanium Metal resemble these other companies. The type of process a company uses and the type of permitting it needs are more important than who the company actually is, he said.
“In this case, with this type of process, it’s a minor air emitter and there’ll be no discharge of water or anything other than into the PWC sewer system. So I think that’s kind of the big thing here for the type of process,” Van Geons said.
As for the company executives, Van Geons said, “I think you will be very impressed with their backgrounds. … If they move forward, all that information will come out.”
The same was true in Laurens County. For the most part, the backgrounds of the executives for the company that had wanted to locate there were exceptional, said Coleman of the county development corporation. The executives were just unable to meet their promises.
“There was no money lost and everything was performance based,” Coleman said. “I mean, until they started spending money and moving dirt and had everything tied up, it wasn’t any skin off our back, really. If we had given them several million dollars and it was blown out the window that would be a little different story.”
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to clarify the timeline for the local incentives offered in relation to the project.
Greg Barnes is a CityView correspondent. He can be reached at gregbarnes401@gmail.com.
The county should do more research concerning the newness of the company and also about Titanium.
Sand Sanderson Farms was a great miss by the community in regards to providing jobs, especially for our young people. If we are not mistaken, Sanderson Farm was prepared to build here and only took their offer off the table when our commissioners initially refused them and then came back to the table. This is totally different than this current situation, I agree that company has been created around September and that there is little information on them, and City must do their own due diligence in vetting this company. We are not so much concerned with the environmental aspects as it is noted that the air quality permit. Would not be one that produces high levels of pollutants. We are interested, however, in seeing the water treatment permit that would be required for this particular company, Especially with our current situation in our outlying areas of Cumberland County still dealing with the issue of PFAS. Countey and City do your job and Thoroughly vet this company. We already lost a thriving Sanderson Farms plant that is doing well and provided hundreds of jobs for even residence of this county and do not want to give fast hopes and have extended promises stretched out like Amazon and even worse by never materializing. We cannot wait to see the public records request that will be received by CV.