Communities have milestone events that echo forward into the future. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes bad.
Fortunately, today Fort Collins celebrated a very good milestone with the ribbon cutting for Woodward’s 303,000-square-foot industrial turbomachinery building on the company’s Lincoln campus at the corner of Lemay and Mulberry. The building has a 7 acre-footprint, and it and the nearby corporate headquarters building are a $200 million new investment in our community.
The roots of today’s event go back to 1955 when Rockford Illinois-based Woodward decided to open a factory in Fort Collins at Lemay and Drake. Then in the mid-2000s the company headquarters was relocated from Illinois to Fort Collins.
Even with a long history here, keeping the company was not a given when it needed to expand its capacity. Woodward is a highly desirable company that any community would love to have. While courted by other places, company leaders had a bias towards Fort Collins, the company enjoys strong support from residents and city officials did enough in the end to secure the new facility for the community.
In the years ahead, this project will have profound, positive impacts on the community: direct employment provided by the company with its large payroll, secondary and induced job creation in other local business sectors, charitable giving, community investments, civic leadership by corporate headquarters staff, and the benefit to the community’s reputation by having a company of this caliber.
Congratulations to Woodward CEO Tom Gendron and his team. A lot of people worked on this project but ones at Woodward directly responsible for overseeing this project are Rocky Scott (now retired), Jennifer Ray, Steve Stiesmeyer and Jim Rudolph.
Go here for a story about this milestone on the Coloradoan website.
Good to www.Woodward.com for more information about Woodward.