Pinal County Market Report 2019

MARKET REPORT 2019

PINAL COUNTY

Long road to success P

inal County has long been content to be the buffer between the two major population centers in Arizona, Pima and Maricopa counties.

Like the midwest is often referred to as flyover country, Pinal County was drive-through country.

Sure, there were sprawling housing developments in parts of the county, namely Maricopa and San Tan Valley, but there was little else that was remarkable about Pinal County. When the recession hit in the late 2000’s, rural

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With plans, infrastructure in place, Pinal County could become automotive manufacturing juggernaut

By STEVE BURKS

areas that were more dependent on the housing boom were especially damaged.

“We anticipated a lot of growth 15 years ago and then we hit the doldrums and everybody felt it,” said Casa Grande Mayor Craig McFarland. “And honestly, rural Arizona is just coming out of it.

Phoenix has been booming for a while and we’re at least 3 or 4 years behind them in terms of activity.”

Pinal County clearly has not been sitting idly by as Phoenix has enjoyed several years of remarkable economic

development. The county has quietly built up its infrastructure — including a large amount of renewable energy sources — and set the groundwork for what appears to be an impending hightech, automotive manufacturing boom.

“The private sector, like ourselves, being ready and having shovel-ready projects with infrastructure in the ground, that’s how we won Lucid Motors,” said Jackob Andersen, president and CEO of Saint Holdings, a developer with two planned industrial

LONG HAUALER: Nikola's fuel cell Class 8 truck, enabling more hydrogen storage, optimized placement of the powertrain, and a robust 70MPa hydrogen fueling network.

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PINAL COUNTY NIKOLA: Company plans to build powersports products like the Reckless, top, and Wave. Below, Nikola has already installed a hydrogen fuel station at its research facility in Phoenix.

parks in Pinal County. “We were picked from 60 different sites around the country. It was water, power and sewer, ready to go, right on site. This is an area that’s been farmed for more than 100 years, you’ve got the majority of the land that’s been laser-leveled with the farms being there.

"You also have a criss-cross of electrical companies meeting here, and you’ve got an abundance of substations here. Very few places have that amount of infrastructure.”

Lucid Motors and Nikola Motors are two of the latest automotive industry disruptors. Lucid plans to build electric cars and Nikola will build hydrogen fuel cell-powered semi trucks. Both companies are at varying stages in the planning process to start building their production plants in Pinal County, in large part because the county was ready and able to welcome these kind of companies.

“We can compete now with Phoenix and Tucson, head to head. We certainly couldn’t do that before because we just didn’t have everything together,” said Tim Kanavel, Pinal County economic development manager. “The companies that we’re getting now are rather large, high tech companies that take up a lot of land. These are 300400 acres, another one is over 1,000 acres. Not everybody’s got that and not everybody’s got rail-served properties, and we have thousands of acres of railserved property and that’s been one of our benefits.”

Andersen’s company is developing the 740-acre Central Arizona Commerce Park, which is where Lucid will be located, and the nearly 2,800-acre Inland Port Arizona, which is where Nikola will build its plant. He, and Kanavel, feel that once these two high-tech manufacturing facilities begin construction, a slew of companion projects will come into the picture.

“The sensors, the cameras, the hightech components that these vehicles have, I think that technology will be coming to this area,” Andersen said.

“I think we’re going to attract more of the electrical vehicle world to this area 76 | May-June 2019

PINAL COUNTY because as these two anchors break ground and people see how welcome that Arizona and Pinal County made them, then they’ll say, ‘hey, they’re open for business.’

“When you create a hub, it just creates a chain of auxiliary uses, supply chain uses and, of course, all of the advantages that you have here as opposed to other parts of the country.”

Of the two companies, Nikola has already established a physical presence in Arizona, opening a hydrogen fuel cell testing and research laboratory in Phoenix. In mid-April, the company held Nikola World 2019 in Scottsdale and unveiled two new hydrogenelectric semi trucks along with three other powersports vehicles, including a military-grade all-terrain vehicle. The company has plans to produce three different models of semi trucks and recreation vehicles, such as the Nikola Reckless ATV as well as jet skis. All

LUCID AIR: The Air will be available with a battery pack that boasts about 240 miles of range on a full charge, or an optional pack that's expected to deliver up to 400 miles of range.

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will be powered by hydrogen fuel cell technology.

Nikola has purchased 400 acres at Inland Port Arizona south of Coolidge and the plan is to begin production of trucks by 2021 and gradually increase the number of jobs to roughly 2,000 in 2024. According to Nikola, there are more than 13,000 pre-orders placed for the trucks, which should quicken the pace of construction.

The land for the Lucid plant was purchased by Pinal County and Lucid will lease the land for the first four years before purchasing it from the county in year five. Lucid was planning to break ground on the facility in spring of 2019.

Pinal County is no stranger to automotive research and development.

Case New Holland America, a tractor manufacturer, tests its driverless tractors at its facility in Casa Grande.

The 3,050-acre Nissan Arizona Testing Center, complete with a five-mile track, is located in Stanfield. Tesla tests its vehicles at the Nissan facility and Audi and Porsche test their automobiles at the Volkswagen North American testing site near Maricopa.

The long-awaited Attesa motorsports

park will also have a research, development and testing component.

Attesa is a 2,500-acre, master-planned motorsports and transportation design community being developed 10 minutes west of Casa Grande. It will feature two configurable road courses, a brand and driver experience center, hotel and convention center, solar plaza, restaurants, shopping and entertainment.

The primary track will be used for vehicle testing, plus major racing events. The membership track, which will be the first project at the development, will feature a luxury club including swimming pool, spa and fitness center, driver’s lounge and locker room. Attesa will also include residential and industrial districts, an airpark and FBO private air strip plus a multi-use area suitable for large scale concerts, closed course off-road races and other events.

Attesa is planning to break ground on the membership track in August.

All of the elements are in place for Pinal County to become a major international hub of automotive research, development and manufacturing. This means that once

A Message from Jason Plotke President and Co-Founder Apex Motor Club

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We located Apex Motor Club in the City of Maricopa because the community is an ideal location for our project for many reasons. Proximity to the 4.7+ million population of the Phoenix Metro was a key factor in our site selection process. The pro-economic development leadership in the City of Maricopa delivered on its promise to us, and fueled us with the grit required to take our project from concept to reality. While Maricopa is just 15 years young, compared with other communities in Metro Phoenix, Maricopa’s elected and administrative leaders demonstrated the most committed growth strategies that we encountered in our site selection process.

Apex Motor Club is proud to be part of that growth and we are confident that our development will be a catalyst for additional quality development in Maricopa and beyond.

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Discover the City of Maricopa’s Many Advantages Jennifer Bostian, Economic Development Officer (520) 316-6990 | jennifer.bostian@maricopa-az.gov

PINAL COUNTY

the ball starts rolling, there will be warehousing needs for the supply chain, as well as light industrial plants for emerging automotive technology.

“Another thing that we have is access to the Sonoran part of Mexico, where they already have a mature supply chain for the automotive industry,” said Andersen. “And all of those are going to morph and change as the industry goes toward electric vehicles. If you look, you have VW, Porsche, Mercedes, they are all talking about their fleets being mostly electric by the mid 2020’s and thats going to go hand-in-hand with the tech that is going to be needed for the autonomy in the vehicle.”

Pinal County is an attractive location for companies looking for new sources of power. The county already has a 20-megawatt solar generating and battery storage facility just north of Coolidge and has three more largescale solar farms in the planning stages. If all three are built as planned, the county will have more than 3,000 acres of solar farms. There’s also 80 | May-June 2019

the Pinal Energy ethanol plant that produces 50 million gallons of ethanol a year and the Green Gas Partners plant, a methane processing facility outside of Stanfield that takes cow manure and converts it to methane gas and fertilizer.

“When you start talking to these companies, particularly the ones out of California, they like green energy and we’re going to have a lot of that,” Kanaval said.

Another key factor that made all of this potential growth possible was the way that the stakeholders in the county — developers and city and county governments — collaborated on making sure their projects or communities were well-positioned when opportunities arose. There was very little in-fighting among the groups as they all saw the possibilities for widespread growth that would benefit the county.

“We’ve made a total about-face in terms of the cooperative and collaborative efforts between all of the

NISSAN TECHNICAL CENTER NORTH AMERICA: Nissan's Arizona Testing Center is a 3,050-acre facility in Stanfield, Arizona

cities and the county,” said McFarland, who has lived in Pinal County for 15 years. “The county and the cities are pretty much in lock step in terms of economic development and it’s really been inspiring to watch it transcend where we were before.”

The middle man in all of this cooperation is Kanavel, who facilitates development and has been a tireless advocate for the county.

“The crash taught the county that we’ve got to do something different,” Kanavel said. “Instead of building houses, which was just building homes, not building jobs. They created my position and said, we’ve got to create jobs and that’s what I do. I don’t do retail, I don’t do housing.

“If you build jobs, the people will come.”

PINAL COUNTY

A spark is all it takes

By STEVE BURKS

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here are nearly 450,000 people living in Pinal County, a mostly rural, sprawling county the size of Connecticut. And each workday, the roads leading out of Pinal County are full of people heading to work.

“The estimate that we’ve heard is that as many as 90,000 people commute out of Pinal County to work in the metro areas, Tucson and Phoenix,” said Coolidge city manager Rick Miller.

“Our hope is that we’ll be able to keep some of those commuters working here, living here and playing here.”

To keep the workers in the county, there first must be jobs. Slowly, companies are planting their flag in Pinal County. Tractor Supply Co., has its West Coast distribution center near Casa Grande, and LKQ, a company that recycles and resells automotive parts and accessories, has a 107,000 square foot distribution center in the same industrial park.

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While those two facilities brought in a couple hundred jobs, the county is eagerly awaiting a pair of projects that will require up to 5,000 employees, the Lucid Motors plant in Casa Grande and the Nikola Motors plant in Coolidge.

“That represents about 5,000 in workforce, full-time employees,” said Tim Kanavel, economic development director for Pinal County. “Nikola says their employees will make $80,000 average and Lucid is $65,000. We’re going to be able to reverse some of that outward flow.”

Those two planned facilities may kick-start a development boom in the county that could push those workforce numbers to close to 10,000 new jobs by 2024. It is expected that supply-chain facilities will follow those two plants, as well as other small manufacturing or research facilities to support Nikola’s hydrogen fuel cell technology and Lucid’s electric

CENTRAL ARIZONA COLLEGE : Pinal County college has launched a training program for advanced manufacturing.

vehicle development. If an advanced automotive manufacturing hub is created in the county, it will draw plenty of supporting industries.

“I think we’re going to attract more of the electrical vehicle world to this area,” said Jackob Andersen, president and CEO of Saint Holdings, the developer of two industrial parks that will be home to Lucid and Nikola. “When you create a hub, it just creates a chain of auxiliary uses, supply chain uses.”

Before Lucid made Pinal County the site of its first manufacturing facility, it began talks with Central Arizona College on a training program for advanced manufacturing. The CAC, which already had a robust and successful manufacturing curriculum, added classes to provide Lucid the kind

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PINAL COUNTY of skilled workers that it needed.

That program expanded up and down the I-10, which was dubbed the Arizona Advanced Technology Network, to Maricopa County Community Colleges (chiefly Mesa Community College) and Pima Community College. In fall of 2019, students can begin work on getting their certification in Automated Industrial Technology, a program formed, in large part, because of the impending arrival of Lucid and Nikola.

“What this curriculum will do is broaden the base,” said Joel Millman, workforce development program manager for Arizona@Work Pinal County. “Folks coming out of Mesa Community College, when Lucid is ready to hire or Nikola is ready to hire, or Boeing or Raytheon, those companies will have a broader base to pull from because they’ll know the commonality of the training.

SKILLED TRAINING: Advanced manufacturing requires updated skills, which are being taught at colleges in Pinal, Pima and Maricopa counties.

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“For what we do at Arizona@Work, this program assists us in helping educate the workforce in Pinal County that come through our doors. For those that do want to work in that industry, this allows us to guide them to that program.”

Millman and Arizona@Work specialize in helping to assist individuals with barriers to employment. They work closely with economic development officials in the county to stay on top of what kind of jobs will be coming, and what training and skills will potential employees will need to be successful.

“We point them in the right direction when it comes to linking them to employment opportunities,” said Millman. “The hope is that this linkage aligns with targeted industries that is set by our County Board of Supervisors.

“We have constant conversations about the workforce expectations in the county. I just want to ensure that expectations are aligned and we’ll do everything possible to work with our direct targeted populations.”

The training program may be in

place in the community colleges, but the high-tech manufacturing jobs have yet to arrive, as neither Lucid or Nikola have begun construction of their facilities. Millman doesn’t see this as a negative, as his group has prepared the foundation and will be ready to deliver a workforce to those sites and the support and supply-chain facilities that will follow.

“We’ve seen the potential number of jobs and the reality is, until we see the buildings coming out of the ground and those help wanted signs posted, that’s when the dust really starts kicking up,” Millman said. “When the reality hits, we just want to make sure we have a good, solid plan in place, regardless of the numbers.

“Everybody realizes the enormity of the potential that’s in front of us, and the historical potential that we do have. Now’s it’s time and you only have one shot at doing it and I think everybody realizes that. While all of the municipalities have their own strategic planning and their own best interests in mind, I think at the end of the day, Pinal County really bands together.”

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PINAL COUNTY

Adventure abounds in Pinal County

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n 2017, Pinal County brought in more than $700 million in revenue from tourism, recreation and entertainment. After seeing those numbers, Pinal County officials launched a campaign to highlight some of the tourism and recreation options that can be found in the county. They produced three videos that put on display the activities that residents and visitors can take part in.

There are also two large-scale entertainment projects that are in the works. The first is Atessa Motorsports Park, which recently announced that it would be building a membership track as the first part of a 2,500-acre development. Another project that has been in the planning stages for several years, but is not dead, is the Dreamport Villages project. It’s set to be a worldclass entertainment amusement park on 1,500 acres. Plans for Dreamport Villages include extreme sports, rock climbing, a water park and wildlife park. Developer Alan Segall is still working on lining up investors for the $4 billion project. As more and more development like Nikola Motors and Lucid Motors arrives in Pinal County, it makes Dreamport Village a more exciting investment.

Here are just some of the other recreation and entertainment options in the county:

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HIKING/MOUNTAIN BIKING/ CAMPING/OUTDOOR

Pinal County is home to five state parks, four wilderness areas, three national monuments and two national forests. There are thousands of miles of hiking, biking, horse riding and all-terrain vehicle trails in the county, including 100 miles of the Arizona National Scenic Trail, a popular hiking and biking trail that runs from Utah to Mexico.

ANNUAL EVENTS

Country Thunder is one of the premier country music festivals in the nation and spans over four days in early April each year.

The event attracts more than 100,000 fans to the desert outside of Florence.

The Arizona Renaissance Festival is a medieval town come to life outside of Gold Canyon. The month-long festival features 13 theater stages, a 30 acre circus, an arts and crafts fair and a jousting tournament stadium.

ENTERTAINMENT

There are two casinos in Pinal County, the Apache Sky in Dudleyville and Harrah’s AkChin and Multi-tainment Center in Maricopa.

GOLF

There are 26 golf courses in Pinal County.

ADVENTURE SPORTS

Skydive Arizona in Eloy is the world’s largest skydiving center, with over 135,000 jumps per year.

Arizona Zipline is on the back of Mount Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Mountains in the southern part of Pinal County. It is the longest zipline in Arizona.

HUNTING

The county is several areas that offer a variety of opportunities for hunting game such as javelina, mule deer and whitetail deer, as well as smaller game such as dove and quail.

BIOSPHERE 2

Located in southern Pinal County, Biosphere is one of the most unique attractions in Arizona. It was designed as a large-scale science experiment and is now a living research laboratory.

GOLDFIELD GHOST TOWN

At the base of the Superstition Mountains, Goldfield Ghost Town takes visitors back to the days of booming mining communities.

There are historic buildings and a historic underground gold mine.

(Source: Pinal County Department of Economic Development)

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