New company to locate in Vision Park

Van Wert independent

A new business is coming to Vision Industrial Park, thanks in part to a $180,000 loan from the Van Wert Revolving Loan Fund.

Lloyd Linton, owner of Tire Waste Transport, which recycles used tires into four products, mostly asphalt-related, formally purchased 3 acres of land in Vision Park where a 12,000-square-foot facility will be built — the first phase of what Linton hopes will be several phases of expansion of the company. Cost of the land was $6,000 an acre, or a total of $18,000.

The Revolving Loan Fund loan will help finance construction of the company’s facility, which Linton said he hopes to break ground on next week sometime, as well as equipment and other start-up costs. The building is expected to be up and running by this fall and would employ somewhere between 8-20 people to begin with. Linton, who said he hopes to expand the facility several times in the next few years, added that he is looking at employing a maximum of somewhere between 300 and 700 people in Van Wert.

Linton, who is from Rockford, said he preferred locating in Van Wert rather than a bigger city. “I didn’t want to live in Chicago, I didn’t want to live in Toledo,” he noted. “I wanted to bring something back to the community.”

Linton thanked several people he said were instrumental in getting his company off the ground, including Economic Development Director Nancy Bowen; Darlene Myers from the local economic development office; Van Wert Mayor Louis Ehmer; Jon Rhoades of the Community Improvement Corporation (which sold Linton the Vision Park land for the new facility); Gary Corcoran, who chairs the Revolving Loan Fund Committee; and the Van Wert County Board of Commissioners.