A Marion County manufacturer is expanding and adding up to 32 jobs with the help of state and local grants.
This week, county officials announced the award of a $48,000 grant from the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development that will help O'Neil Color and Compounding Corp. with a $1.9 million expansion in Jasper, Tenn.
"What we try to do here in Marion County is support existing business," county Mayor John Graham said. "If we wouldn't have gotten these 32 additional jobs, there was a good chance some or all of the 90 existing jobs would have gone somewhere else."
The company makes thermo-plastic color additives for the plastics industry. O'Neil has been in Jasper since 1988 and was acquired by Primex Plastics in 1993.
O'Neil has added 18 of the 32 production jobs since July, officials said. As the facility grows, more employees will be brought in. The grants will provide utility preparation work for a 30,000-square-foot warehouse and maintenance shop, and the company also received grants for employee training.
"The combined city, county and state grants were really very important," said Mark Bruner, the company's president. "The total grant could be worth in the range of up to $500,000."
O'Neil could have located the plant in Richmond, Ind., Bruner said.
"We had a choice between doing this expansion here or in Indiana," he said. "The grant money was probably the deciding factor."
The average salary for the new jobs is $10 an hour, Bruner said.
Staff writer Adam Crisp contributed to this story.