STOW: City planners were seeing dollar signs when the state built a new interchange off state Route 8 at Seasons Road in 2010.
The last frontier of undeveloped land in Stow had finally been given easy access to a popular highway, so surely businesses and land developers would be rushing in to paint the canvas.
Stow and its border neighbors of Cuyahoga Falls and Hudson — two communities with their own share of undeveloped land in that corner — even talked about a unique economic development partnership to market the area as a medical corridor, anchored by a planned new hospital.
But the three-city partnership never happened. The hospital never happened. And a crippling recession kept any other opportunities from rising up to take their place.
That was then.
This is now:
• Last year, Summit County finished a sanitary sewer expansion in the area. Combined with city projects that widened Seasons Road and added waterlines, some 400 acres of property have been turned into shovel-ready commercial and industrial opportunity.
• A new 114,000-square-foot building on Seasons Road within sight of the Route 8 on-ramp was completed in December and is 75 percent full. Ray Fogg Corporate Properties said demand for the area is so great, it anticipates breaking ground on a second building later this year, with room for a third building at a later date.
• Albrecht Inc., which had been sitting on vacant land rendered useless by a drought of utilities, is now building two office structures on its Hudson Drive Business Center campus.
• Wrayco, a manufacturer that specializes in leakproof vessels for heavy construction equipment, built a new addition on its Seasons Road building and expanded its transportation capabilities.
It’s the kind of activity that gives city planners a reason to wake up in the morning.
“It’s been frustrating but you can only do so much when you go through an economic downturn,” Stow Planning Director Rob Kurtz said. “You spend years setting things up, then nothing happens.”
Added Stow Economic Development Coordinator Ken Trenner: “When people see vacant buildings, they always think there has to be something more the city can do.” But until the recession released its grip, officials could only sit and wait.
The region has now recovered enough that vacant buildings are starting to reach capacity, Trenner said, and that’s when the earth movers get dusted off.
“Now they are looking at vacant land and starting to build new,” Trenner said.
It has taken decades for Seasons Road to reach this point.
Since the 1970s, the Ohio Department of Transportation had run hot and cold on whether to put state Route 8 ramps in. Then in 2001, the Ohio Department of Transportation announced if the communities wanted an interchange, they’d have to find a way to pay for it themselves.
So they did just that. Stow and Hudson petitioned for federal aid and won $4 million to join its local contribution of $3.7 million.
Meanwhile, Stow spent $1.2 million to extend Seasons Road all the way to Hudson Drive; stimulus funds helped pay for sewer lines and a sanitary pump station to support whatever industry the highway might bring; and waterlines were installed along Seasons, McCauley and Allen roads.
The catalyst for all of that effort? A dream that was ultimately never realized.
Summa Health System and a group of doctors had announced their intention to build a 100-bed hospital in the area. They encouraged Stow, Hudson and Cuyahoga Falls to work together to make the corner ready for their arrival.
Mayors of all three cities signed a memorandum of understanding in support of something that had never before been tried in the state of Ohio — a three-city Joint Economic Development Zone (JEDZ). The 225-acre medical corridor would be made up of equal parts of land from each city, and they would jointly service and market the area, and share in any income tax generated by new businesses.
But a couple of years later, the hospital plan was stalled indefinitely, and city officials let the idea of a JEDZ die a natural death.
“The concept was driven by the hospital so when that didn’t come to fruition, the idea just went dormant,” Stow Mayor Sara Kline said.
Each city was left on its own to make the most of the Route 8 interchange, and Cuyahoga Falls and Hudson reported no new businesses can be directly attributed to Seasons Road improvements.
But for Stow, last year’s sewer expansion by the county was the final piece of the puzzle needed to make hundreds of acres on its side of the border shovel-ready.
Albrecht Inc. Senior Vice President Jack Juron said the new infrastructure finally allowed the company to make use of a 100-acre former dairy farm behind its Hudson Drive Business Center campus. Albrecht bought it in 2005, along with a 125,000-square-foot building formerly used by Goodyear as a mold plant.
“We knew it was going to be a happening place,” Juron said.
The old Goodyear building attracted a couple tenants, including a large plastics distributor. And Albrecht poured the foundations for a couple new “flex” buildings that could serve as office or warehouse space. But when the economy collapsed, the steel purchased for the structures was put into storage.
When the recession ended, Albrecht finished those two buildings and filled them with new tenants. But that old farmland was still out of reach of utilities until last year.
The interchange “was all fine and good, but without sanitary sewer we couldn’t really develop it,” Juron said.
Now that the sewer is in, Albrecht is on its way to finishing two new office buildings, with plans for a third flex facility.
“There’s so much demand right now,” Juron said.
Mark Ray is also seeing that demand. The vice president of Ray Fogg Corporate Properties said the first of three planned buildings in what is being called the Seasons Road Business Center has been filling quickly since construction was completed four months ago.
An identical 114,000-square-foot building could break ground this year, he said.
“We own 3 million square feet of space in Northeast Ohio, and of all our properties, [Seasons Road] is one of the strongest markets,” Ray said. “The location is so good. You get on Route 8 and you’re just minutes away from the [Ohio] Turnpike. You can go north, south, east, west very quickly.”
Paula Schleis can be reached at 330-996-3741 or pschleis@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/paulaschleis.