Company Eyes Purchase of Portland Property

Dan Carroll, the CEO of Specialty Lighting Group, would like to move his company to Portland and indications are, town officials would like to help him do that.

And why not, the building Carroll is interested in is the old Smurf-It Stone Container complex at 74 Pickering St. in the town’s industrial park, which has been sitting empty for three years.

Smurf-It Stone filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2009 and later that year closed its Portland plant, which employed 93 people.

The building, with a price tag listed at $1,450,000 on the internet, is 175,000 square feet and sits on 11.4 acres. That’s big, which means a big tax bill.

That’s one of the reasons for Carroll’s appearance before the Board of Selectmen on Wednesday night.

He would like the town to work with him on a tax incentive that would make the move more feasible, especially in light of the improvements to the property that will have to be made.

“This building needs a tremendous amount of work,” said Carroll, who has had engineers look at it. “The original structure was built in the 1940s and was added onto in the 70s. So, even the newer part is aging at this point. We have no choice but to improve the property.

“We have to look and search for every possible advantage we can take in fixing our costs while we address improving this property.”

Carroll has been in regular contact with First Selectwoman Susand Bransfield and also has spoken with Economic Development Consultant Mary Dickerson.

“I am very excited to have you so interested in coming to Portland," Bransfield said. "We’ve met already and we’ve talked several times on the phone, and I’ve been working with the assessor, our finance department in putting together a proposal for the selectmen. I think it is so important for our businesses as well as our new businesses coming in, if they are going to be investing and reinvesting in property, that they be able to know that their expenses can be somewhat fixed for a period of time, of course in keeping with our laws and what the selectmen feel is appropriate.”

Carroll said he was impressed with Bransfield and Dickerson.

“You don’t often see that type of support, so it was kind of refreshing,” he said.

Carroll and his wife started the business in 1990. Headquartered in Centerbrook and with an additional warehouse in Old Saybrook, the company employs 50 people, 43 of whom are based in the state. The company has sales offices in New York, New Jersey, Orlando, Fla., Columbus, Ohio, and San Francisco.

“We’ve grown substantially since those days,” Carroll said. “We’ve been very fortunate to sustain and actually grow our business through the economic downturn of the last few years and to that extent we’ve outgrown our facilities in Centerbrook.”

Centerbrook houses office space and a small distribution space of about 24,000 square feet. The Old Saybrook warehouse has an additional 41,000 square feet. Should the purchase go through, all state operations would be moved to Portland.

“We would operate completely out of this facility,” he said.

Another option Carroll is considering is to rent the old Cheesebrough Ponds (now Unilever) building in Clinton, but his preference is to purchase.

“We would like to move to Portland and I think Portland would be better off for having us,” he said. “We’re growing and we plan to continue that growth.”

Specialty Lighting Group is a wholesale lighting distributor, serving national account customers such as retail store chains, hospitality, restaurant chains and banks.

“Anybody who is building multiple facilities throughout the country, region or internationally for that matter, that’s who our customer is,” Carroll said. “We supply them the lighting that they use when they’re building or renovating new stores and hotels and facilities.

Some of his customers include Barnes & Noble, Ann Taylor and Subway, the company’s biggest customer.

“If you went into the mall you’d see 20 or 30 of our customers represented there,” he said.

Besides the financial benefit to seeing a large empty commercial building come back to life, the town could also see new jobs as a result, a point Carroll stressed.

“We are growing. We’re adding jobs as we speak,” he said. “I would anticipate increasing our workforce in Connecticut by at least 10 percent between now and the end of the year and that could mean jobs for Portland. And those jobs are varied. … We kind of cover the economic spectrum of employment.”

Though the property is larger than the company’s current needs are, Carroll said it would fulfill its needs for many years. The size of the lot also would give him options.

With all the acreage it comes with, one possibility would be to redevelop the property.

"Part of our long-range plan with this property would probably be to redevelop it,” Carroll said, adding that providing smaller industrial spaces that small businesses would want to move into would be his long-range plan.

“It certainly has a large potential. It’s a very big building and for years supplied employment for people in the area,” Bransfield said.

Selectman Mark Finkelstein made a motion for the first selectwoman to “Update and refurbish our tax incentive policy for economic development” and asked for a policy to consider by the last meeting in August. The motion passed unanimously.

Deciding on the Portland location did not come quickly for Carroll, who had been searching more than two years ago. In the beginning, that search included looking out of state.

“We contemplated moving out of the state a few years ago because [Connecticut] is not the most business-friendly state around,” Carroll said. “We weighed that against the 43 families we support, because if we moved the business only a handful of those people would have followed us out of state. Our first commitment was to remain here in Connecticut.”

Carroll hopes to have a deal done soon and not long after begin moving at least some of his operations to Portland.

“The intention here would be to first move our warehousing facility, which is the 41,000 square feet in Old Saybrook,” he said. “That’s our main warehousing facility. We would move that over here immediately.”

And as for the office operation that is in Centerbrook?

“The office space at 74 Pickering is not useable,” Carroll said. “That would have to be completely demolished and rebuilt. So, I would anticipate that the office staff would move over here sometime in the spring of 2013.”

Of course any rebuilding would require new lighting. Would Specialty Lighting Group provide its own?

“I think so, Carroll laughed, joking he might put it out for bid to see what kind of deal he can get.

Why not follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook?