NORTH KINGSTOWN – A British company planning to build a training facility for wind turbine maintenance workers at Quonset Business Park with the help of state tax credits has pulled the plug on the project.
Daniel Boon, vice president for GEV Group, said in an interview on Wednesday that the company abandoned its Quonset plans – both the building and hiring local workers – four months ago, opting to try its luck in Dallas instead, where it recently opened a U.S. headquarters.
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GEV Wind Power US LLC had planned to open a 10,000-square-foot training facility in Quonset by 2023 with at least 123 local workers, per the terms of the $1.9 million in tax credits approved by R.I. Commerce Corp.
However, the company had struggled to find qualified workers to make good on its agreement with Commerce, with just two technicians hired as of February 2021, nearly two years after it struck the tax incentive deal, PBN previously reported.
Per the terms of the state’s Qualified Jobs Incentive Tax Credit, the credits are not awarded until the jobs are created and income tax withholdings are generated, so the state has not lost any money. Instead, GEV has given up the possibility of earning those credits by not moving forward with its plans. Boon also said construction of the building itself was not far along before the company killed the project.
The decision to relocate the training facility Dallas was motivated primarily by the opening of a company office there, not because of the challenges in hiring in Rhode Island, Boon said.
GEV still has an operational office in Rhode Island based out of the Cambridge Innovation Center Providence with four employees, Boon said.
David Preston, a spokesperson for Quonset Development Corp., said in an email on Wednesday that GEV never selected a site or signed any kind of lease agreement for the facility.
(SUBS last paragraph with Quonset comment.)
Nancy Lavin is a PBN staff writer. You may reach her at Lavin@PBN.com.
Seems to me that instead of giving away handouts at taxpayer expense, the government should have been training people to fill these jobs.