Will tire plant follow distribution center?

Last week’s announcement that Kumho Tire plans to build a distribution and logistics center in the Franklin area represents a big win in economic development, a governmental sphere where competition is fierce for far smaller projects than the 100-150 jobs Kumho is offering.

Now local officials are hoping that the South Korea-based company will one day not just ship tires from St. Mary Parish, but make them here as well. Whether that will happen isn’t clear.

The center promises more jobs for a parish battered for more than eight years by low energy prices and the pandemic. And it could help smooth out the boom-and-bust cycle of energy dependence that has been the rule in St. Mary since the 1940s.

Representatives of Kumho and the Melis Group signed the deal last week for Melis to operate the 350,000-square-foot center somewhere at a still undetermined site in Franklin. That led to speculation that Kumho will eventually bring a tire manufacturing plant here.

The company, which manufactures tires in east Asia as well as in the United States, recently launched a $350 million expansion.

St. Mary offers South Louisiana Community College campuses in Morgan City and Franklin. Over the last couple of decades, two-year colleges have taken on the role of creating specialized training programs for employers in their area.

At a press conference last week, Franklin Mayor Eugene Foulcard also referred to the SLCC welding and trucking school recently authorized for the Baldwin area. The distribution center will also mean jobs for truckers, he said.

At the press conference, Melis CEO Reginald Delisbour, a native of Franklin who left the area to join the military in the 1980s, said he learned a lesson about the need for economic development when south Louisiana Fruit of the Loom plants closed in the mid-1990s.

Those closures eliminated thousands of jobs at plants from Acadia and Vermilion to Jeanerette, where a factory was converted to a warehouse.

Officials also mentioned that St. Mary is also home to three large carbon black plants: Cabot Corp., Birla Carbon and Orion Engineered Carbon.

Carbon black is processed from carbon and petroleum and is needed to make tires.

It’s not clear what the proximity to the carbon black operations would do for a distribution center. But a tire manufacturing plant could benefit from nearby access to that material.

Attempts to reach Kumho for comment on the prospects for a tire plant here were unsuccessful.

But “clearly the intention and hope is for the manufacturing plant to be in St. Mary Parish near the carbon black plants,” said Parish President David Hanagriff.

A manufacturing plant would mean hundreds more jobs for the region.

The unemployment rate in St. Mary Parish was 3.8% in November, according to the Louisiana Workforce Development Commission. That was down from 5% in November 2021 at the end of most COVID-19 restrictions.

But over the same year, the number of people employed in the parish slipped by nearly 300 to 17,906.

U.S. Census Bureau estimates indicate that St. Mary Parish, where the population often fluctuates with the fortunes of the energy industry, may have lost another 1,000 people from the 2020 Census to 2021.