I Want a Tower!
Time to play a little SimCity.
Not sure if y’all picked up on this, but a hometown corporation just won a bidding war to buy out one of their prime competitors. When the two companies merge, they’ll make the 5th largest North American corporation in their sector. The resultant company should fall somewhere in the Fortune 200. Exciting stuff right?
While this company only has 200 resident employees Downtown in the Borden Building right now, the new, merged company will have more than 21,000 employees worldwide. To put that into perspective, Nationwide has about 35,000 employees.
It’d be impossible to bring all 21,000 employees here to Central Ohio, but a good chunk of the target corporation’s front office employees are located in Houston and Salt Lake City. A few thousand of those employees could easily populate an shiny new skyscraper downtown.
OK….enough with the suspense. The hometown company I’m talking about is Hexion. They’re in the process of buying out Huntsman Corp. Here’s the roundup from The Dispatch.
Never heard of either company right? Well how could they increase their name recognition? Wouldn’t a new skyscraper do the trick?
Picture this Mr. Parent-Company CEO…
A TV shot pans from the ’shoe on gameday over to the downtown skyline…
TV Announcer: “Well there you see the Hexion Building towering over the skyline of beautiful Downtown Columbus, Ohio! What an architectural marvel! Did you know it’s the largest green building in the world? They even used their own environmentally sensitive products in it’s construction. Incredible!”
For cryin’ out loud, they’ve even got a picture of the materials they supply to build skyscrapers on their website!
Of course this is all just speculation right now, but here’s what we know:
1) The combined company will consolidate some of their operations and shed a few overlapping units. All mergers do.
2) The possible downside, as this article points out, is that Columbus could lose it’s 200 existing jobs if the companies could set up shop in Houston.
3) The possible upside, is that Columbus could gain over 1,000 high-, high-, high-paying jobs.
All I know, is that if I’m Mayor Mike, I’m on the phone with these CEO’s four times a day, 7 days a week trying to figure out how I can make this happen. We’ll give ‘em tax breaks, briefcases full of cash, whatever it takes to bring these jobs downtown. Throw everything we’ve got at them!
Hey Hexion…How does The Hexion Michigan-Ohio State Classic sound? I think we can even hook that up for you.
Haha - I was looking to buy the new Sim City last night.
It would be very cool for something like this to happen, but its more of a wait and see approach.
And please no sponsorship of The Game.
This is pretty exciting news to say the least. I’ll be sure to keep an eye on it over the days and weeks, or at least hope the media puts a high priority on it. It would really be something to see a nice, shiny, modern structure take center stage downtown.
The reason we are vying with Kansas City for the title of “Most obliterated Downtown” is because of these office towers. They obviously aren’t the sole reason, as plenty of other cities have them (much better looking ones too) without tearing down nearly as much as we have. However, most other cities at least have decent mass transit and without that employees Downtown are each going to bring their own vehicle into the city. Where are those 1000+ employees going to park? I guess we could add a couple of parking garages to Riversouth and change the name to Garage District South. Give us a nice plaza surrounded by architecturally impressive, 5 story residential buildings with cafes and restaurants spilling out onto to it along with a few European brand clothing stores as a draw for Downtown and then we’ll have something to drool over. I’m not at all crazy about more of the same.