Officials from TruPointe Cooperative Inc. and Kosciusko County Economic Development Corporation closed a land deal Friday that will bring a multi-million-dollar fertilizer processing plant to the Milford area.

The facility will be located just outside of the town limits, at the northeast corner of the junction of the CSX east-west rail line and the Norfolk-Southern north-south rail line. Both will be heavily used by the company.

According to KEDCo President George Robertson, the $30 million state-of-the-art fertilizer processing facility will be one of the larger plants of its type. Plans call for it to offer around 40 highly-specialized jobs at “very good” wages of approximately $50,000 to $60,000 a year, he said, and create a new tax base in the region.

“It’s going to be just one more resource for the farming community here. It will give them one more place to go to sell or buy grain and feed,” Robertson said.

Plans also call for TruPointe to build a second facility a couple of years down the road, a 40,000-square-foot to 50,000-square-foot grain storage facility. TruPointe is also in the business of buying and selling feed and producing liquid fuel and related products.

Five properties owned by the Beer and Eisenhour families were purchased by the company, some of the handful of homes involved will be left standing for the time being and possibly converted to offices, Robertson said. Design has also begun on the intersection of CRs 100 East and 1350 North, where a stop sign will likely be added.

The next step will be to move forward with an Industrial-3 rezoning request that goes before the Kosciusko County Area Plan Commission tomorrow afternoon. The county will create a tax increment financing district to capture some of the increased tax assessement that will occur. Some of those funds will be used for improvements to CR 100 East.

The vacation of a portion of Old SR 15 from North Street in Milford Junction north to CR 1400 North, and of CR 1350 North from Old SR 15 east to CR 100 East, have already been approved by the APC and are necessary so that the company can construct a circular train track without disputing the flow of traffic.

Improvements will also be made to 1300 North. Plans call for that roadway to be extended to SR 15.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: On Wednesday, Dec. 5, Robertson clarified that the 40,000-square-feet to 50,000-square-foot dimension refers to the size of the planned fertilizer plant, not grain storage facility that is planned for two to three years from now.)