Cummins celebrates warehouse grand opening

CLOVIS - Anyone might feel a little cramped spending 40 years in the same building, especially when you're a Fortune 500 company wanting to hire more people to help build tank engines.

Fortunately for Cummins Natural Gas Engines, Clovis and the state of New Mexico were happy to help make some more room.

Community members, city officials and Cummins employees gathered on Thursday to celebrate the grand opening of a new 22,500 square foot warehouse building with a ceremonial ribbon cutting at Cummins Clovis manufacturing facility.

Cummins worked with the Clovis Industrial Development Corporation (CIDC) to construct the building, which it will now lease from the CIDC.

Funding for the $1.2 million project came from a variety of sources, with the state of New Mexico providing $250,000, the city providing a grant for $440,000 and the CIDC borrowing the final $550,000 from the city to be paid back over the next 10 years, according to CIDC Executive Director Chase Gentry.

"I think (the CIDC) and the city economic board are committed to keeping them here," Gentry said. "They're a Fortune 500 company and we're lucky to have them. We want to make sure they can stay here and that they can grow."

The new warehouse will serve as a starting point for future expansions for Cummins and has already created 11 new jobs at the plant with more job opportunities expected in the near future, according to Plant Manager Scott Odom.

"We've been here for over 40 years building natural gas engines," Odom said. "We were in our original building the entire time and have reached a point where we just ran out of room to keep growing."

Cummins brought in two new business ventures last year, creating automatic transfer switches and remanufacturing diesel engines at the Clovis location, but ran out of space to house new projects.

According to Odom, the new building is being used as a warehouse, but was designed in such a way that one wall can be easily unbolted for additional construction and expansion later on.

"Right now we're solely set up for this to be a warehouse, but the idea is that we might move manufacturing here as soon as we're ready for our next business opportunity," Odom said.

During the ceremony, general contractor David Petty received a $10,000 gift from the CIDC as thanks for his contributions toward the project. Petty was credited with saving an estimated $300,000 in construction costs to help keep the project within its $1.2 million budget.

Construction on the new warehouse began last October with an initial budget of $950,000 before receiving additional funds over the course of the construction, with an extra $100,000 from the state and another $150,000 from grants.