08/03/2015 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Minutes of the Special Meeting of Council Monday, August 3, 2015 informed ine that Dr. Fujita really wanted to stay in Mayfield Village and was earnestly looking around here. That's kind of the background. We have tried to maintain pretty tight communication throughout that period. As you all know, the Euclid Industries site at 6660 which has been renumbered, had gone vacant and dark in about 2005. Euclid Industries was there until 1999 and then I think it was 2005 Arvin Meritor which was sort of a subsidiary stuck around for a while and then they closed shop and the place has been vacant. It's about 200,000 square feet of space. For around 3 years Superior Beverage has used about 2/3rds of the space for distribution but the former owner was mothballing the site and not doing a whole lot to make any kind of improvements so roughly around the time that QED was looking was when Premier acquired the property and started to change things around. QED came here at a time when we invested and were putting in our fiber on Beta and we had an agreement with Panzica's landlord to put $50,000 toward infrastructure improvement to one of his properties on the east side of Beta and two companies came on board, one was Preemptive Solutions and the other was QED, both tech oriented businesses. QED at the time had three employees. QED moved once after that inside Panzica and then moved across the street to the old Velocity Sports facility at 700 Beta which again you recall was a site that had been repurposed by a development ground and ultimately Hilton Garden went in the back of that property. QED today has over 130 employees. When we started looking at this a few months ago collectively with Council you recall that they really were very concerned about what kind of lease terms they would have, what kind of infrastructure improvement would have to be made to Premier, we had a lot of conversations with the folks at Premier to try to leverage the situation. I think primarily because we enjoy a very good line of communication with Dr. Fujita, we learned enough insight that this deal was going down to be able to work both sides of the deal if you will. At the end of the day, we looked at the numbers. Ron projects that right now modestly at the current employee number that QED has and remember this is Biotech, these are all physicists, other scientists, engineers, I think the average salary is north of $70,000. It's a very clean industry, if you can even call it an industry. We have seen QED go from 3 people to the number it has today. It's about our sixth best revenue generator in Mayfield Village, recognized nationally and internationally with all kinds of awards to boot. Our attention was really focused on how to make this deal work in order to retain jobs and to improve infrastructure. A parallel discussion in P/Z for years has been how much of the improved properties in Beta have been tired. They are old. Most of those are vintage. Anywhere from 30-50 years old. When we looked at the SKF deal a few years ago at 600 Beta, that was a deal that required about $4 million to improve 90,000 square feet of space. That deal finally fell through. SKF ended up going over to Alpha Drive to a facility that Premier had acquired there. When we had looked at the Euclid Industries site a few years ago, I think we had ballparked anywhere from $4-5 million in improvements for what is essentially an old school office building up front and the rest is a large garage, distribution and trucking facility.