A newly created division of Tennessee-based Sunrae Environmental, Realbright Sunrae Water is headed by Mike Schieck, who said he plans to bring profitable and environmental business ventures to locations throughout the southeastern United States.
“I don’t think people understand this is that this is a startup company,” said Walker County economic develop-ment director Larry Brooks. “He’s bringing this in to start trying to make an investment here for jobs.”
According to Brooks, no Walker County funds will be put into the new business. “They have not asked us for anything,” he said. “They have not even asked us for any tax abatements.”
The water bottling plant was not an idea that Brooks and the county pursued actively, but rather one that Schieck dreamed and suggested, though Walker County had been interested in perhaps fostering a future relation-ship with a possible Sunrae venture at some point.
“We were just talking to him about some other projects he was interested in,” said Brooks, “and we had not even heard from him for several months, and out of the blue he called us up and said he was able to get this new business and he’d like to locate in Walker County.
“He’s got relationships with folks in Mississippi or Tennessee and we’re just really lucky that he wanted to come to us,” he said. “You have somebody who could locate this thing anywhere he wants to, because he’s not even from this area.”
Green light on building site
The business, which has already begun moving into the county, will be located in a portion of the Barwick-Archer building complex, owned by Drennon Crutchfield, who visited the site Wednesday, May 9, and saw the be-ginning evidence of Sunrae’s new venture.
“He is going to put a water bottling (operation) in there,” said Crutchfield. “He’s got the equipment over there, stainless steel bottling equipment.”
Crutchfield has almost finished renovating the 40,000 square feet — “it’s one building that’s part of the complex” — that Schieck will be using.
“I’m putting in about $20,000 worth of new lighting in there, and I’m going to finish the bathrooms and clean the floors and turn it over to him,” he said.
“It’s probably going to take him a month (to prepare the equipment), because he’s got to do something to the walls.”
Crutchfield has experience leasing out part of his property to companies. Currently there are about five small industrial businesses leasing parts of the Barwick-Archer complex, and more have come and gone in past years.
Crutchfield stated that other buildings on the site have room for Schieck to expand, should he need to.
Schieck signed a three-year lease with Crutchfield for the 40,000 square feet in question, which according to Crutchfield has already been cleaned of asbestos some years ago and has undergone phases 1 and 2 of the EPA’s environmental site assessment process.
Sunrae shrugs off cloudy welcome
Dr. Robert Beeman, chief operations officer for Realbright Sunrae, is a bit displeased about how the news has been received by the Walker County blogo-sphere, but states that the company remains undeterred from the new project.
“There’s been a lot of bad press, a lot of bad press on Facebook about Sunrae, and we don’t care about that.”
“Sunrae is a green tech company,” he explained. “Right now we’re starting out in water bottling. We’re going to put a plant in to bottle water at 9146 Highway 341. Our intention is to make a profit.”
Beeman specified that Sunrae is first and foremost a business and wants to be successful in its new venture.
“A lot of green technology companies have a burden of, say, a liberal extreme progressive ideology,” said Bee-man.
“We’re a company of conservatives,” he said, noting that fiscal success comes far before activism in Sunrae’s priorities. “We’re trying to make a profit for our stockholders and we’re trying to do this to create a profit all the way down the line.”
The bottling plant will employ up to a couple of dozen or more personnel during the initial phases of construc-tion and beyond, and Beeman is adamant that only Walker County residents get the new jobs.
“We’re going to need people to help construct the plant, help with equipment and security, so it’ll be an up and down thing,” he said of the number of employees.
“We are absolutely determined to get every single one of those employees from that county,” he continued. “If we cannot find someone with the skills that we need in that county, then we’ll go outside, but we’d rather not have to do that.”
“If we could afford it, we’d rather train someone from that county than go outside because we’d like to be able to give back to and help out the community that’s welcoming us.”
Beeman sees Sunrae entering into a new area as akin to an individual moving into a new community – both need to make friendships and connections in their new base of operations.
“The way to make a profit is to make a profit at home. It’s your home, so you take care of your neighbors,” he said.
As for the process of bottling water, Beeman stated that the water used will come from a source close to the plant, but that the company has not yet decided on a precise location.
“It’ll come locally,” Beeman said. “We have many locations in mind but we’re not sure where exactly yet.”
Beeman has seen the Barwick-Archer building and is excited about its potential, tentatively hoping that the op-eration could even expand into more areas of the complex in the future.
“We’re hoping to. It’s a gigantic place.”
He does not foresee any environmental cleanup problems with the site, though it is noted for its age.
“We’re not anticipating any EPA involvement at all except for the regulatory involvement,” he said. “Frankly we don’t think there’s going to be any problems down there. We’ve looked at the site and it looks like it’ll be fine.”
Overall, Beeman and the company are excited about the potential to create a new name in bottled water, which is a very cost-effective way to be environmentally friendly while still staying in the black.
“Its one of the best ways to get started in green technology,” he said. “If you can find good clean bottled water locally, you’re a leg up on people that are selling this stuff across the country or even oversees.”
“There are a lot of people bottling water. You can make a profit at it. It tends to create more jobs than a lot of other technologies simply because you have to have somebody selling the stuff and this creates an enormous num-ber of jobs in the area for sales,” he said.
And, despite the company being green, water bottling, he said, is an all-encompassing industry without any par-tisan strings attached, which is just what Sunrae specializes in.
“There’s very little political weight to bottling water.”
Snarky, you sent me to some benign article in the TFP that did nothing to support your obviously biased hit job. Then I stumbled on this article from CNN Money about the job growth in Walker County. The only problem I see here is that your commissioner is graciously wasting time in a photo op with only 20 potential jobs when she should be doing TV interviews touting her amazing success in a county stuck in the middle of nowhere with little access. I rarely support either side in a debate (skeptical of all) however looking at the economic facts, the only crap I see is from a small group of jealous hateful do nothings but gripe. In fact, since you mentioned the CR project, I looked at the WC tax base and what I see there is that your LU was successful in destroying a $49M tax base spreading the lost tax burden on the rest of the county residents. A hotel with 200 jobs might have shored up the value of that property. I'm as anti-government bailout as anyone but in rare cases they they can be the lesser of 2 evils. I assume the golf course and surrounding property now has returned to the forrest from which it came. Maybe you guys will be successful in turning your county over to a nut case and mitigate all progress back to the cherished days of wilderness, camp sites and liquor stills.
If one little online blog can do that,then it must have been pretty shaky to begin with.
I have no connection with LU whatever.I've been on there maybe a couple of times through link throughs.Not my cup of tea.
But I don't need the LU to do my thinking for me. you obviously want Bebe to do yours for you. maybe you want to live in Boss Hogg Hazzard county,but I don't. If this gracious woman hasn't achieved what she wanted to in three terms,she never will. She's just running again because she loves power.She loves dispensing favors that only the county can do. Favors that will be kept until needed,when the grantees can return the favors in good coin.
You sound threatened that somebody would voice an opinion that maybe it is time for some new blood and new ideas to take the county into the future.But then the status quo fears any kind of change in direction.
And if you listen to her, which you probably do, she said the deal collapsed because of the bond market - not the people or the LU. Fortunately for us the bond market collapsed BEFORE she got the bonds to sell, otherwise the county would be in millions more dollars of debt than it already is.
Walker County has been in trouble long before the LU Web site came along, all we've done is highlight some of the problems and the reasons behind them.
Now that's what I call fair warning. After the election, when Bebe and the crony capitalists at the development authority have "more flexibility", you can dab on some lipstick and kiss a lot of tax dollars goodbye. The only difference between this little boondoggle and Canyon Ridge will be the land elevation.
I'm a little ticked off at this Dr. Beeman character. He's never run a water company. As far as I can tell,he writes books that nobody buys and operates a website that spouts some way- out there- drivel. The guy may have never set foot in Walker County and he's giving us a ration about questioning the motives of the local political wheeler dealers.
He also seems to have disapeared. He's now missing from the "management team" page at Sunrae environmental's website as of 5-12-12.
Nobody is anti-job. That's absurd. Jobs and capitalism (REAL capitalism,where businesses make money with their work and innovation and not their political connections) are what built the system that we have. Nobody is against that.
But lots of folks that I talk to are getting pretty mad that their tax bills go in one direction while career politicians retire from fairly low paid positions as wealthy people.It's a measure of how little this woman thinks of us that she thinks that we will be wowed by 20 new jobs when she stood by like a potted plant as BlueBird took good paying jobs out of the area. Darn right I'm mad.I hope you are too.
And I'm even more furious at the idiots that want to "shut down" the Lafayette Underground. (Or any other publication). We're adults. We can read the LU and decide if they are full of crap. Maybe its not my cup o' tea, but the only thing standing between the public and totally corrupt government is the sunlight of discussion. Maybe if the establishment press did its job better and didn't just print what politicians feed them,the LU would go away because there would be no need for it.