Mesquite Lands Beverage Can Manufacturing Plant

By VERNON ROBISON

The Progress

The City of Mesquite has been selected to be the home of a new state-of-the-art aluminum beverage can manufacturing facility. On Friday, Sept. 24, Crown Holdings, Inc, a global Fortune 300 company, announced that its new southwestern United States plant will be located in the Mesquite Technology and Commerce Center.

The new 355,000 square foot facility will supply beverage cans for the company’s commercial customers throughout the western United States, according to a statement released by the company on Friday.

The plant is expected to begin operations in the second quarter of 2023 and will create 126 new jobs in the community, the statement said.
“Obviously, we are thrilled!” said Mesquite Mayor Al Litman in an interview with The Progress on Friday. “This will be bringing good-paying jobs and lots of tax dollars to the city.”

Litman said that the project will provide a strong option for more of the young people of the region to stay here and enter a viable career.

“This is a company that offers good salaries and major retirement benefits and everything else,” Litman said. “And, you know, that is rather rare in private industry nowadays. So they obviously have a business philosophy of retaining employees on a long-term basis. Their employees have a reason to stay.”

The deal bringing Crown Holdings to Mesquite has been several months in the works. Because of a non-disclosure agreement prohibiting release of the name and other vital information about the company to the public, the Crown Holdings project has been referred to in the city simply as “Project Washboard.”

The deal has been shepherded through the process by Mesquite resident and businessman Cody Law. Law’s company, Citywide Consulting, has been under contract to provide economic development services to Mesquite since February of this year.

In an interview with The Progress, Law said that, after the deal was made, Crown Holdings officials admitted that they had initially only planned to pass through and take a look at Mesquite as a formality.

“They were just doing their due diligence with the real plans to locate somewhere else in a larger market,” Law said. “But they said that it was really what we did, and the red carpet treatment they received here, that won them over to Mesquite.”

The initial lead for Crown Holdings had come from the Governor’s Office for Economic Development through the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance (LVGEA), Law said.

“Most big companies go through the LVGEA initially so that they can apply for tax abatements and other incentives at the state level first off,” Law said. “If they just come straight to me at the community level, then they have to climb up the ladder for those incentives later and it doesn’t make sense. But they had heard about Mesquite already, even before they called LVGEA.”

Law said that he contacted the site selector for Crown Holdings and set up a meeting with him and the company’s Vice President of Engineering in May.
“We put up a tent and we met them out at the proposed site,” Law said. “We told them the story about Mesquite and they liked what they heard.”

Two weeks later, in early June, the president of the company and a group of Crown Holdings executives came out in a company jet to take a closer look at Mesquite.

“We wined and dined them,” Law said. “We picked them up in a limo at the airport in St. George and brought them here. We took them to the golf courses and they got to play a little golf. We had a nice dinner with elected officials in the city and others. They also met small business owners as well as key executives in our key local businesses. I had them meet specific owners so that they could hear the story of why other people have chosen to start and keep businesses in Mesquite.”

“I made it an intimate experience,” Law added. “And by the time they left, I had the President of the company tell me that he wished he could come and start the company here himself. He loved this place.”

Shortly after that trip, Law received the message that Crown Holdings had made a decision and they were ready to bring the business to Mesquite.

Law said that the deal will be a “game-changer” for Mesquite. The huge manufacturing plant will bring $181 million in capital investment to the city, before they even hire anyone, Law said. The average starting wage for employees will be in the $50,000-$60,000 range for the company. And property tax revenues alone for the project will bring more than $8 million to the City over a ten year period.

“Plus, this is a company that wants to be very involved in the community,” Law added. “They are going to sponsor Little League teams and football teams and support a lot of community efforts and initiatives out there.”

City Councilman George Gault said in an interview that he is delighted that the deal is finally reaching its conclusion and is going to happen. Gault is also President of the Board of Mesquite Works, a non-profit organization seeking to develop a stronger regional workforce for northeastern Clark County communities.

Gault said that the project will brings challenges, especially with respect to quickly building an adequate and trained workforce in Mesquite. But Gault said he and others have already been working to provide skills-training and certification programs locally that will prepare the workforce for these new skilled manufacturing positions.

“We look forward to putting together a Zoom meeting with company officials as well as with people from Workforce Connections and the College of Southern Nevada (CSN),” Gault said. “That way we can identify the timeline of their needs.”

There will be some time – while the company completes grading and earthwork on its site and then goes through the construction process on the facility. During that time Gault said that those necessary training resources can be developed in the city.

“We have good resources with CSN here,” Gault said. “They are very flexible and responsive to our needs. I am confident that we will be able to meet the needs of this project.”

Litman said that another challenge would be providing adequate housing in the city for this larger workforce. But solutions to that problem are also in the works, he said. Several large multi-family housing developments have been approved recently by City Council and will be under construction even as the Crown Holdings project moves forward, Litman said.

“We have all these new apartments, that are already on the books, that will start coming on the market,” Litman said. “So I think the timing is going to be very good and everything is just falling into place. This was very good news today!”