August/September Business View Magazine

232 233 Arista Information Systems’ high-volume printing and mailing service can streamline and reduce your operational costs. Your organization will benefit from a 24 hour processing and distribution turnaround time, postage savings, custom bill design options, and high-speed full-color printing quality. Discover all the ways Arista can meet your bill production needs at Aristainfo.com . BILL PRODUCTION MADE SIMPLE. 70 Years of Superior Service VALLENCOURT CONSTRUCTION IS DEDICATED TO PROVIDING EXPERT ON SITE DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS THAT ARE COMPLETED ON TIME AND WITHIN BUDGET. 449 Center Street, Green Cove Springs, FL 32043 phone: (904) 291-9330 | vallencourt.com are currently operating in to one flagship building. In January, they announced that they are going to invest $86 million and construct a 187,000-square- foot corporate headquarters, and add 300 new jobs at an average wage of $80,000 a year within a ten- year period.They will also maintain the 800 em- ployees that they already have, here in the county.” “That was a true public-private partnership,” Glasgow continues.“Not only did we offer them incentives as our policy provides for -$2.8 million in local incentives - they also received state incentives. In addition, they needed to obtain property that the county owned that was going to be located in the front of the site that they were ultimately going to construct the building on. So,we needed to negoti- ate a land conveyance. In return, the company will relocate a public safety control tower and recon- struct one at a higher rating than what we currently have in place at no cost to the county.We will also be relocating the tax collector building that services that area in Ponte Vedra to a new leased space, which ultimately improves the customer experience and improves our county’s cost of maintaining a ST. JOHNS COUNTY, FLORIDA long-term space. Based on our ability to accomplish this innovative partnership, it made themwant to commit to this future expansion and long-term investment in St. Johns County, and we’re thrilled about that.” Glasgow comments upon several other recent public-private partnerships: “One was a Lowes Home Improvement project,” she reports.“The negotiations occurred in 2011, during the recession. They did not have a presence in St. Johns County and they wanted to locate near the corner of our busiest traffic intersection,which is along U.S. 1 and State Road 312.We had an old, antiquated health and human services facility there that needed quite a bit of improvement.They approached the county to see if they could purchase the property from the county,which is ultimately what happened, and they ended up paying us more than fair market value for the property,which gave us the money to be able to construct a brand new health and human services facility further north and within the county complex. The facility was functionally obsolete and we were going to have to put in millions to renovate it. So, we gained a brand new health and human services facility, providing all the services that were avail- able before, and gained a new retailer, generating much needed sales tax revenue and property tax revenue on formerly tax-exempt land, and creating jobs in our community at a time when it was very important to do so.That was unique at the time and it turned out very well. Lowes opened in 2016 and is doing great; it’s still the only Lowes project in St. Johns County.” Another public-private partnership was estab-