MORGANTOWN — Seeing is believing.
And members of the Monongalia County Commission said Wednesday they believe people are going to be amazed when they see Mountaintop Beverage.
“Enormous” is the word Commission President Tom Bloom used to not only describe the size of the facility located in the expanded Morgantown Industrial Park, but the impact it will have locally and across the state.
“When people see this … You talk about Mylan, but when they see this they’re going to see the kind of business, the salaries they’re paying, the expansion and what it’s going to do for West Virginia’s economy,” he said. “It’s going to touch everything.”
The 300,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art aseptic manufacturing facility is expected to be online by the end of the year with an initial workforce of up to 250.
Aseptic processing is a technique wherein sterilized liquid products are packaged into sterilized containers to produce shelf-stable products that do not require refrigeration.
The $200 million investment in the plant included space to potentially double the size of the facility to 600,000 square feet in the future.
The promise of a round-the-clock flow of up to 100 trucks daily to the site also helped push conversation for the need of a new Harmony Grove Interchange connecting the Morgantown Industrial Park to I-79 directly.
In May, Gov. Jim Justice threw the state’s weight behind the interchange project. West Virginia’s representatives in Washington have also voiced support.
Even so, members of the commission said they were glad Senator Shelley Moore Capito was able to actually see the Mountaintop Beverage site when she was in town on Tuesday.
“The most important part of that visit is, one, it really puts reality to what’s going on up on that hill. The other part of it, and a selfish reason we wanted her to be there, is to ensure that anything she can do in D.C. to make sure the interchange goes through occurs,” Commissioner Sean Sikora said.
“Because when you come off Master Graphics and you turn into the wide, four-lane that leads to the site and you come up over that hill … it’s like, you suddenly kind of get it as to what’s going on up there.”
