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Massena’s Curran Renewable Energy will have to spend $15 million on 50-worker expansion before receiving $3.5 million grant

Posted 1/16/16

By ANDY GARDNER MASSENA -- A project to be funded with a $3.5 million Regional Economic Development Council grant could bring more than 50 jobs to the area. However, the entrepreneur behind the …

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Massena’s Curran Renewable Energy will have to spend $15 million on 50-worker expansion before receiving $3.5 million grant

Posted

By ANDY GARDNER

MASSENA -- A project to be funded with a $3.5 million Regional Economic Development Council grant could bring more than 50 jobs to the area. However, the entrepreneur behind the project says he has to finance and start the new business before he can think about hiring.

Pat Curran, president of Seaway Timber Harvesting and Curran Renewable Energy, wants to spend $15 million on two new facilities. One would expand on his wood pellet plant and make wood shavings and briquettes that could be a substitute for firewood. The other would be a sawmill and pallet manufacturing plant.

“We’re working on trying to put the financing together. It isn’t impossible, but it’s difficult. I feel confident we’ll gain the financing and pull the project off,” Curran said. “So far in the past, we’ve had pretty good relationships with the banking facilities we’ve worked with.”

In order to get the state money, Curran must first spend $15 million, build the project and employ 50 people.

“I haven’t been real excited because there’s money sitting out there that you can’t use to build the project,” he said.

Curran’s $3.5 million grant from the Regional Economic Development Council is about half of the $7.7 million total awarded to 15 projects in St. Lawrence County, including his.

He says world markets could stymie the project.

“What we’re always up against on the border is a very robust forest products industry in Quebec and as long as the Canadian dollar trades like it is, it’s going to be very hard with a new business to compete. It’s going to be very hard to draw Canadian businesses down here … because of the exchange rate,” he said Jan. 8. “I wouldn’t say I’m pretty confident. Who would have thought the stock market would have dropped in the last couple of days.”

If he can get the new business off the ground, which he says will be a new entity with a new name, he hopes to build “in the Massena area, depending on the space.”

His current enterprises are in the Massena Industrial Park, but space there is limited.

“We don’t have room for everything in the Industrial Park,” he said.

One of the plants would make wood shavings and briquettes. The shavings would mainly be bailed for animal bedding, he said.

The briquettes can be used as a piece of firewood, Curran said. They are more dense than logs and are 5 to 6 percent moisture content. Seasoned firewood is 20 percent moisture, Curran said.

He said the 50 jobs would likely be split evenly between the two facilities, 25 each, and would likely be full-time.

“I really like to employ people full-time,” Curran said. “Working in New York state and having an office in St. Lawrence County, we hire people to work for us in three different counties up here. There’s a lot of great people and opportunities. With opportunities, the people prove they’re very viable.”

He said he might not hire 50 people immediately.

“You have to develop the market. To get to 50 jobs overnight, it would be pretty hard to do that,” Curran said, adding that he will probably start with 25 new employees.

He said he is looking at the new enterprises because he wants to take advantage of local natural resources.

“It’s really because of the resources we have. If we want to create anything up here, we really have to look underneath our feet to see what’s here, look around you,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of opportunities to do a lot of things with forest products. The general area we reside in, tremendous amount of the forest is low-grade timber, which will go well with what I’m aiming at.”

He said the St. Lawrence County Industrial Development Agency (IDA) was huge at getting his first two businesses up and running, and he will turn to them for the new businesses.

“When we built the wood pellet factory, if it weren’t for the local IDA, I wouldn’t have had the knowledge I need … to gain the funding to pull off the project. Here we are again asking for help from the local IDA and they’re working with us,” Curran said. “Anything I’ve ever built, you have to start from the bottom.”