by Nashville, Tennessee is justly famous as being the center of country music. It is home to both the Grand Ole Opry and the Country Music Hall of Fame. And, if the rumors being reported by The Tennessean are correct, the future home to a major Remington Arms manufacturing plant.
One of the nation’s largest gun manufacturers, Remington Arms, has looked at sites around Nashville for a potential corporate relocation or expansion that would likely include hundreds of manufacturing jobs.
The Madison, N.C.-based company, which is part of the nation’s largest firearms company and has its largest plant in Ilion, N.Y, has scouted sites near Nashville’s airport, Lebanon and in Clarksville, Tenn.
Why Nashville?
According to the story, a plant in Middle Tennessee would place it between their plants in Lonoke, AR and Mayfield, KY. Moreover, it would only be a 2 hour drive to their technical and research center in Elizabethton, KY. They also have a distribution center run by a third party in Memphis.
An expanded article in today’s Tennessean notes that owners of industrial locations are having their properties scouted.
Reports about Remington’s search for sites come as owners of large tracts of land and economic development officials said they’re seeing more corporate relocation and other prospects in Middle Tennessee. Within the past two months, local real estate investor and developer Bert Mathews has encountered unidentified prospects at his 180-acre Buchanan Point site near Nashville International Airport off Interstate 40.
They include a 50-acre user, a 10-acre user and other users that had sought space for a 250,000-square-foot building. “Everybody’s looking at Nashville,” said Mathews, also a past chairman of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce.
Local and regional economic development officials were mum when asked about Remington’s search. “It is the policy of the Clarksville-Montgomery County Economic Development Council to refrain from discussing business recruitment projects, whether they be rumored or real,” said spokeswoman Robin Burton.
If Remington chooses to relocate operations from New York, it would add to the list of companies doing or planning to do so in part to protest stricter gun laws.
I should emphasize that these are only rumors but I doubt The Tennessean would have run a story specifically naming Remington Arms unless they had a solid source confirming the visits by Remington.
On the face of it, Middle Tennesse makes sense. You have engineering programs at Vanderbilt and Tennessee State along with engineering programs at Tennessee Tech, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Memphis which are within easy driving distance. You have a transportation hub with the intersection of Interstates 24, 40, and 65 and a good airport. And you have a gun-friendly, business-friendly right-to-work state.
What’s not to like about all of that if you are in the firearms industry?
Why would engineering programs at the local schools make a diff?
I would think tax breaks mean a hell of a lot more to a manufacturing business.