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For More information contact:
Dave Spencer
Northeast Regional Director
Wyoming Business Council
Office: 307.689.1320

Tom Barritt
Weston County Development Board
Phone: 307.468.2600

Public invited to dedication of the Upton Regional Industrial Site

 CHEYENNE - The Weston County Development Board (WCDB) will dedicate the new Upton Regional Industrial Site at 1 p.m. on Jan. 24 at the Industrial Site Office in Upton.

The dedication will feature speakers from the town of Upton, Wyoming Business Council, Bonneville Transport Incorporated (BTI), Western Biomass, Materi Operating and Inspection and the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railroad. Bradley Road will also be dedicated at the event to Bradley Albert, a Weston County resident who was killed during the construction of the park. Albert’s parents will be on hand for the event.

The Upton Regional Industrial Site, which was first conceived by the volunteer Weston County Development Board (WCDB) in 2002 and acquired by the WCDB in 2003, is a 600-acre site, built with funds and services from the Wyoming Business Council’s Business Ready Community program, the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality, Weston County, the town of Upton and the WCDB.

Currently the site has two companies leasing land in its boundaries – Western BioMass, which produces ethanol from waste wood and Orica, which is off-loading ammonium nitrate from rail cars to trucks for delivery to coal mines in the Powder River Basin. BTI is managing the movement of the rail cars for Upton and as a transloading operator at the site. Materi Operating and Inspection has also secured land in the site and two other firms are also looking at space in the site. All five companies either expanded their operations or moved to Upton since the opening of the Industrial Site.

“What we did with this site was to get these companies to come and diversify our economy,” said WCDB member Tom Barritt. “We lost American Colloid which was our major industry here. When you lose a company where you have 80 employees it hits a small community pretty hard. We think it (their local economy) is going to be better than when they were here because it is going to be more diversified.”

The WCDB began work on the Upton Regional Industrial Site in 2004 and the town of Upton received a $1.5 million Business Ready Community Grant from the Wyoming Business Council in 2002 for Phase I of construction at the site, and another $473,000 for road construction in 2005’s Phase II grant, sponsored by Weston County, through the Business Ready Community program. The original WCDB members signed personal notes to purchase the 560-acre American Colloid Bentonite site in 2002.

With the Business Ready Community grants, the old American Colloid rail siding was moved to the Upton Regional Industrial Park and the old plant was demolished. A sewer line and a lift station on Iron Creek were also installed with the grant funds.

Upton received professional services through the Brownfield program through the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality.

The mission of the Wyoming Business Council is to facilitate the economic growth of Wyoming. For more information, please visit the Web site at www.wyomingbusiness.org.