07/14/03
By GINA HANNAH
Times Business Writer ginah@htimes.com
Toyota officials and Gov. Bob Riley were to announce this afternoon a $20 million expansion of the automaker's Huntsville engine plant.
The company is adding V-6 engines to its production line here, said Dennis Cuneo, senior vice president of Toyota North America Manufacturing. The engines will be installed in Toyota's Tacoma and Tundra pickup trucks. The expansion will add about 150 jobs at the plant, bringing the total number of employees to 500.
Cuneo said the decision to expand the plant was made late last week. Riley, whose schedule didn't allow him to be in Huntsville today, was to make the announcement at 2:30 p.m. at the World Business Center in Birmingham.
A group of Huntsville business and political leaders was to attend the event.
"This is a natural for Alabama," Cuneo said. "This solidifies our Alabama plant's position as the truck engine facility for our North American plants."
He said the expansion allows Toyota to continue moving from Japan to the United States more production of parts going into U.S.-made trucks.
"We've already accomplished that with our cars," Cuneo said.
The 40,000-square-foot expansion, expected to be complete by mid-2005, will add 130,000 engines to the plant's annual production, boosting the total production to 250,000 engines a year, he said. He was unsure when construction on the expansion would begin.
Toyota is getting about $3.5 million in incentives for the expansion, most in the form of job training, Cuneo said. Other incentives include some property and sales tax breaks, he said.
He said the expansion's economic impact on the area is estimated to be about $316 million over 20 years.
"Existing industry is our greatest source of economic growth and jobs," said Brian Hilson, president of the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce. "Toyota is a globally recognized company, and our community will be very excited" about the expansion.
The V-6 engines will be assembled in Huntsville but machined in Japan, Cuneo said. The V-8 engines already made in Huntsville, which are installed in Toyota's Tundra full-size pickup trucks, are machined here.
The V-6 engines will be shipped to Toyota's plants in Indiana, California, Mexico and San Antonio, which will begin production in 2006.
In May, Toyota threw a party at the $220 million Huntsville plant celebrating the launch of its V-8 engine production. Japan's largest automaker has 34,000 employees in North America.
Like the original plant, the expansion will be built by union labor, Cuneo said. Toyota has an agreement with the AFL-CIO to hire only contractors that use union workers. None of the automaker's U.S. plants is unionized.
Last week, Mercedes-Benz International announced Paula Lillard, general manager of administration at the Toyota engine plant, had left Toyota to join the Mercedes plant in Tuscaloosa. Cuneo said Toyota has not yet hired Lillard's replacement.
