(The following story by Jean Tarbett Hardiman appeared on The Herald-Dispatch website on April 1.)
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — CSX is adding a $4.5 million dispatching center to its 7th Avenue facility to accommodate 80 workers it is moving to Huntington from Jacksonville, Fla.
Most of the relocated workers will be train dispatchers, whose salaries are among the top 10 percent at CSX, said Michael Ward, CSX chairman, president and chief executive officer. They earn an average $80,000, or about $115,000 including benefits, he said.
They’re not new jobs to which local residents can apply right now, he pointed out. But as the dispatchers retire, CSX will need replacements.
The move is a joint effort with the state of West Virginia, Ward said.
Tuesday’s announcement comes after the state offered Economic Opportunity Tax Credits for each job created in the move, and the state is providing $2,000 per employee for training.
“There’s nobody who wants you to succeed more than we do,” Gov. Joe Manchin told Ward during a press conference Tuesday outside CSX.
Manchin talked about some of the changes that West Virginia has made in recent years to make the state’s business climate more inviting.
He said he started the process of change by going to Wall Street to talk with investors about what West Virginia needed to change. Then the state started making changes, starting with the overhaul of the worker’s compensation system.
The incentives that the state is providing, along with its corporate tax rate, indicate that West Virginia truly is “open for business,” Ward said.
The train business is doing well because of a rise in fuel prices, a shortage of truck drivers and increased congestion on the roadways, he said.
“This really is a great time to be in railroading,” Ward said. “America’s railroads are solving real problems like traffic congestion on the highways and emissions from motor vehicles. One train can carry one ton of freight 423 miles on a single gallon of fuel.”
He said recent estimates suggest that today’s population of more than 300 million Americans will grow to almost 340 million people by 2020. Meanwhile, freight volumes by ton are expected to increase by nearly 50 percent.
With the train business doing well, CSX is growing and therefore making more investments, Ward said.
Besides train dispatcher, the jobs coming to Huntington include some signal maintainers and supervisory positions. CSX reports that construction should be completed in May and operations will begin in August.
The train dispatchers are in charge of planning, directing and responding to issues involving the movement of trains, maintenance and inspection equipment on CSXT tracks.
These 80 jobs are among the first of about 260 in Jacksonville that will relocate to other cities to put dispatchers closer to the tracks they cover.
Huntington is getting the most jobs, and some of the workers to move here have lived here previously, Ward said.
Other cities that will get new jobs from Jacksonville are Baltimore, Nashville, Cincinnati, Florence, S.C., and Atlanta.
“We’re having trouble finding people who want to go to Baltimore,” Ward said. “We’re not having trouble finding people who want to go to West Virginia.”
According to the Huntington Area Development Corp.’s list of top area employers, CSX now employs about 1,100 people in its Huntington Division.