PLATTSBURGH -- A Canadian bus manufacturer will hold a ceremonial ground-breaking ceremony next Wednesday.
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"The new Plattsburgh bus-manufacturing assembly plant will employ a team of up to 435 when it is fully operational," Dion said in the letter sent to local business and government officials.
Those jobs are expected to pay between $12 and $18 per hour.
Based in Saint-Eustache, Quebec, Nova Bus is a wholly owned subsidiary of Volvo Bus Corp., the second-largest motorcoach and transit-bus manufacturing group. Volvo Group has 15,000 employees in North America, which includes more than 12,000 in the United States.
The bus assembly plant is to be built by V.I.P. Structures of Syracuse. A sketch plan presented to the Town of Plattsburgh Planning Board by V.I.P. President Charles Wallace Jr. shows a 136,000-square-foot building to be located north of the UPS facility on Banker Road. By comparison, the UPS building is about 40,800 square feet.
Wallace said that would include about 108,000 square feet of production space and 18,000 square feet of office space and cafeteria. The production facility will be 33 feet high, with a flat roof.
The initial building have between 200 and 300 employees, he said. Space has been left for expansion of the production area and office space.
At peak production, the plant would produce two buses a day, Wallace said. He said Nova Bus plans for a single shift workday at the start, with about 20 buses under production at any one time.
Each bus spends about 4 hours at each station, then is moved to the next stage
There will initially be about 281 parking spaces, with future parking indicated at 500 spaces.
Terry Horst of Maxian and Horst, a landscape architecture and land planning firm based in Syracuse, said three entrances from Banker Road are on the plan: one for employees, one for employees that also connects to a gated delivery entrance and a gated entrance that connects to the facility's test track.
Bus parking is indicated to the east of the building. In addition to the test track, buses will be driven about 20 miles on nearby city and highway roads for testing.
The sketch plan was unanimously approved by the Topwn Planning Board. V.I.P. still needs approval of a detailed plan, and of a State Environmental Quality Review for the project.
The Development Corporation President Adoré Flynn Kurtz said it will sell the property to V.I.P. Structures, who will sell it to Nova Bus at the end of construction. The property is located within the City of Plattsburgh Empire Zone.
The Plattsburgh facility will allow the company to meet U.S. content provisions that are part of almost all large metropolitan transit contracts, similar to the reason Bombardier built a railcar-assembly plant in Plattsburgh.
Nova Bus was founded in 1993. It was acquired by Prevost, a Volvo subsidiary, in 1998.
Prevost had been acquired by Volvo Bus Corp. and Henlys Group, PLC, in 1995. As of Jan. 1, Nova Bus and Prevost are separate subsidiaries of Volvo Bus Canada.
Nova Bus was named Large Company of the Year at the Specialty Vehicle and Transportation Equipment Manufacturers Association conference in November.
More than 3,500 Nova Bus low-floor buses are in service in the United States and Canada.
dheath@pressrepublican.com
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