News

BIG FOREST: The courtship of Sierra Nevada

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in Mills River. [PHOTO BY PAULA ROBERTS]

By Bill Moss, Published: April 7, 2014

PART 4: Zodiacs to the rescue

Fitzpatrick is a fifth generation descendant of the Westfeldt family, which had owned the property since the 1870s. The family had used the woods on the river as a summer retreat from New Orleans since the early 1900s. A rambling two-story wood-frame home, which the family called the Green House, had served as headquarters for the extended Westfeldt family for generations. Now, in August of 2011, the house and its wide wrap-around porch became a meeting place for the Grossmans and the county economic development team. The day after they toured the site on their own, without the Partnership team, the Grossmans and Cooper set a meeting with the recruiters. The visit, Tate knew, would be critical.
Rocky Hyder"We were told we were going to have X amount of hours with them on Monday, Aug. 22," Tate said.
"We met at the Green House, very attractive, great vantage point. People loved being there. We entertained them on the porch of the Green House, started with a site overview, went over everything from utilities to transportation. We really played up the river in a substantial way and then we pitched for the first time some different options for where this rail transload facility could take place. We went through an extensive vision for the property. Vaughan and I years ago developed a written shared vision for the property."
But Tate and his team didn't just want to tell about the French Broad. They believed they had an asset that their competitors could not match.
"We wanted them to get on the river and be close to the river," Tate said. "Chip Gould, who was on our board at the time, actually went out and measured the boat ramp at Westfeldt Park to see if he could pull his boat out of Lake Lure and take everybody on it; we decided that wasn't going to work.
"So we made an emergency call to (county emergency management director) Rocky Hyder and said, 'Rocky, we understand you've got these Zodiac boats for swiftwater rescue, do you want to help us take some clients out?'
"Rocky totally jumped on it and completely took ownership of it. By the time we showed up there, they had a tent set up with rescue personnel that had life jackets and radios; it was a very well managed process.
"We put their team — Ken Grossman, Brian Grossman, Stan Cooper and Don Schjeldahl, that was their team — and we put their team two at a time on the boat and we put Vaughan on the boat with them to kind of tell them about the history of the river," Tate said.
Roads, rail and waterlines were important to the brewery. A river was not on the list.
"It was pretty entertaining," Brian Grossman said of the boat ride. "When we first shot out for site selection, being next to a body of water wasn't a big thing for us. It was just another advantage to the property. We're looking at it (and saying), 'Here's this great water access. We can do something with that.'"
Stan CooperUnplanned, the rescue worker driving the boat Cooper had boarded made a detour that was one of a thousand small turns that helped tilt the decision.
"He sees a garbage bag full of garbage hung up on some rocks and he says, 'you guys mind if we try to go get that?'" Cooper recalled. "'No.' We went and retrieved it. Guy didn't have a clue who we were, and that was very impressive. He didn't put on a show — it was legit. That just sort of set the tone for this whole region that people care."
If a tone had been set, the deal was far from done. Other competitors remained in adjoining counties and adjoining states. Some were offering free land; the Ferncliff owners weren't giving away their family heritage property. Still, other competitors fell away.
On Sept. 12, Tate got an email. "McDowell's out," it said. "Henderson County's still standing."
"And two hours later," he said, "I was meeting with Steve Wyatt to catch him up to speed."
Wyatt, the Henderson County manager, had been quick to respond to industrial prospects. The board that he worked for had always placed a strong emphasis on job creation, all the more so since the deep recession of 2008.
The planning that Tate had done with Fitzpatrick several years earlier was paying off now. The Partnership had assembled a thick book of information and certifications on the site that would save a client time and money. The idea is to eliminate risk on the front end and to draw a clear picture of the cost and process of getting water, sewer, gas, roads, electricity and other infrastructure to the site.
"This notebook's important," Tate said, taking it out of a file cabinet. "It's thick, someone's put time into this. This is very intentional, this is not an accident, and that's what this shows. They latched on to these at this first visit. They each had one. We set up a shared Dropbox folder (for sending large files the Internet) where we put all these things in the cloud and we started sharing information that way. ... Timing was an issue; that's what that notebook and that certification issue are all about."