BTi News
- Construction of Fiber-Optic Center in Leetonia to Begin
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// Mar 23, 2006
EAST LIVERPOOL, Ohio - The Columbiana County Port Authority has authorized $4.1 million in funding to enable B-Telecom Inc. to build a network operations center in World Trade Park outside Leetonia and complete its Sonet ring.
The authority board approved obtaining a $1.5 million revolving line of credit from Fifth Third Bank, Cincinnati, for B-Telecom's fiber-optic project in the industrial park. As a tax-exempt entity, the port authority can borrow at a lower rate and pass those savings on to B-Telecom, based in Chardon.
The authority can borrow at "slightly below prime," said its chief executive officer, Tracy Drake, somewhere around "4.8 or 4.9%."
The authority also approved borrowing $2.6 million from Fifth Third to build B-Telecom's network center that would occupy a building of 22,000 square feet on 7.4 acres in the industrial park. Ground should be broken next month, Drake said. House & Baird will act as construction manager, he added. The building has been scaled back from the 70,000 square feet mentioned more than a year ago.
"This is the step we've been waiting for," Drake told his board. "This is where the fiber-optic network is managed, it will bring new companies to Columbiana County" and see B-Telecom hire 52 people within three years to run the facility.
Fifth Third replaces Bank One, now Chase Bank, as the financier of the B-Telecom effort.
The line of credit the port authority has established with Fifth Third replaces its line with Bank One. It will be paid down with $875,000 from the state capital budget secured last year through the efforts of state Rep. Charles Blasdel, R-1st, East Liverpool. The remainder will be paid down from the rent B-Telecom pays the authority.
The $875,000 will purchase two strands of high-speed fiber-optic cable. Those strands will provide the port authority the exclusive commercialization rights to the 260-mile Sonet ring under construction in Columbiana and Mahoning counties.
The Access Council, a consortium of local schools, is paying for the other 10 strands that serve 26 public school systems in the Mahoning County and northern Columbiana County.
Construction on the operations center was scheduled to begin in February 2005 and be complete last June, Drake said at the authority's January 2005 meeting. B-Telecom agreed to pay the port authority $185,600 for the 7.4 acres in the industrial park.
Once complete, the B-Telecom building will also serve as a back-up data and retrieval center for major corporations within a 300-mile radius of the county. Should a disaster occur - for example, a power outage resulting from a major storm that knocks out a company's on-site primary and secondary sources - the company would have real-time access to its data in Leetonia.
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