Business View Magazine | May 2019

209 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE MAY 2019 MI LLV I LLE , NEW JERSEY the Wheaton family for nearly its entire existence, at its height, the company had 41 factories throughout the United States and subsidiaries in 20 other countries. For many decades, it was said that if you lived in Millville, you probably worked at the Wheaton Plant, which, unfortunately closed down in the mid 1990s, with the loss of thousands of jobs, and today, still sits idle. “The City is working with somebody who is looking to redevelop the Wheaton Plant as another industrial site,” says Samantha Silvers, Millville’s Supervising Planner. “We’re at the preliminary stages of looking at those redevelopment plans; they just submitted them, so I can’t say that there’s really anything on the books, yet. There is an active cleanup on it; it is being remediated. With that type of contamination, the cost to remediate it to something above an industrial standard is very costly. So, I don’t see it turning around and becoming a residential development or something, but to at least address the dilapidated buildings and get the lot cleaned up with new industrial development would be great.” Millville’s other historic claim to fame is the Millville Army Air Field, dubbed “America’s First Defense Airport.” It opened in 1941, and soon became an important training and refueling site for the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. In its three-year existence, over 10,000 soldiers and civilians served there, with about 1,500 pilots receiving advanced fighter training in P-47 Thunderbolts. After the war, the Air Field was returned to the City of Millville. Today, the renamed Millville Executive Airport is a thriving general aviation facility, owned by the city and managed by the Delaware River & Bay Authority. The Airport is New Jersey’s second largest, strategically located at the center of the Northeast Corridor, one of business aviation’s busiest flying corridors. Recently, Millville has had a portion of the Airport designated as a Foreign Free Trade Zone (FTZ). The United States government operates around 293 FTZs throughout the 50 states. They are secured, designated locations, in or near a U.S. Customs Port of Entry, where foreign and domestic