Monsanto gets OK for housing next to new plant
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BY ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star
YORK — York County commissioners cleared the way Wednesday for seed-corn giant Monsanto to include apartments for as many as 275 seasonal workers in construction of its proposed processing and research plant west of Utica.
The plant, part of the company’s pending $155 million expansion in Nebraska, is scheduled to be in use for the 2009 harvest.
Monsanto management has doubts that adequate housing would be available in nearby towns for migrant workers involved with detasseling and related chores, said Monsanto spokesman Tom Schaffran.
“I would think the majority of them would be there for less than four months” per year, Schaffran told commissioners.
The 4-0 vote by county officials allows agriculturally zoned property midway between Utica and Waco to be used for industrial development.
The roll call came with some conditions, including attention to the drainage impacts that will go with covering a large expanse with concrete.
Much to the dismay of several members of the audience, the same vote gives the go-ahead for what County Zoning Administrator Orval Stahr described as “accessory use” for housing, “just like an office building for a warehouse would be.”
Farming neighbors Fred Scheele, Jack Vrbka and Hal Cummins got a chance to speak their piece prior to the roll call. They raised several concerns, including supervision of the housing units after normal working hours.
“There’s places to put up apartment buildings in York,” said Scheele.
Vrbka said he lives only about 500 yards away from what will become a residential population as large as Waco or Gresham, located 8 miles to the north. “It’s not in my back yard. It’s in my front yard,” he said.
Cummins was also critical. “I spent two years in south Georgia and I know what mill town housing looks like,” he said.
Cummins was still sounding off as he left the commissioners’ meeting at the York County Courthouse.
“We just question why they want to put a town bigger than Waco out in the country,” he said.
Another nearby farmer, Gary Schlechte, was a bit more accommodating. “They’re good corporate citizens,” Schlechte said of Monsanto. “Do I like the concept? No, I’m not real comfortable with it, but I think it’s workable.”
Monsanto’s Schaffran said the company did not have to use on-site housing at a sister plant at Kearney.
“The community and the surrounding communities were large enough to support the workers,” he said.
However, there is housing next to the company’s seed-corn processing operations west of Iowa City, Iowa, and near the much smaller town of Williamsburg.
Reached there Wednesday, Ray Garringer, a county commissioner in Iowa County, said Monsanto’s on-site housing “hasn’t been a problem at all.”
According to Garringer, “most of them leave here by around the first of October. Many of their kids start school here.”
One of the pluses at Williamsburg, he said, is that children of migrant workers are still in school there at the time of an annual head count used to determine state education funding.
York County Commission Chairman Ken Stuhr of Waco said he was also pleased with the report he got in checking out similar housing used by Green Giant in its vegetable harvest in Wisconsin.
“There’s been nothing but positive information received on that plant up there,” he said.
Schaffran said Monsanto has been able to hire high school students to do as much as 75 percent of its seasonal seed-corn work in York and surrounding counties. But the labor requirement will get bigger soon.
“Basically, production in Nebraska will double with the addition of this plant.”
At a Dec. 18 public hearing on the Monsanto project, questions were also raised about safety, security, sewage handling and possible strains on the Centennial School District that serves Utica and the surrounding area.
A Centennial school board member said then that enrollment was down and economic development was important to the area.
“We want to be a good corporate neighbor,” Schaffran said Wednesday. “We’ll do everything in our power to fit in in York County.”
Reach Art Hovey at 523-4949 or at ahovey@alltel.net.
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