CP Industries will invest $21.7 million to expand its McKeesport factory and hire 78 additional workers, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro announced Thursday, in a deal the state won against competing sites in Alabama and Michigan.
The expansion, supported by a $3 million Pennsylvania Industrial Development Authority loan and $920,000 in state grants, also sustains 115 existing full-time jobs, according to the announcement reported by Tube City Online. The Christy Park plant manufactures pressurised containers used by utilities, transport companies and the US government.
The factory carries a long industrial lineage: built in 1897 as part of National Tube Company's operations, it is now the only US manufacturing site of Everest Kanto Cylinder Limited of India, whose other plants are in India, Dubai and China. McKeesport Mayor Tommy Maglicco told local reporters the city had reviewed blueprints and permits with the company for months without grasping the project's full scale until the announcement.
Shapiro framed the win bluntly in his office's prepared statement, saying Pennsylvania went head-to-head with other states for the Mon Valley investment and won. Site-selection fights of exactly this kind, mid-sized expansions with three-state shortlists, are where state incentive packages are increasingly decisive, because the capital amounts are small enough that a state loan or grant can close a genuine cost gap.
For the Mon Valley, a region still defined by the long aftermath of steel's contraction, 78 new industrial jobs attached to an operating plant is the kind of unglamorous, durable win economic development officials chase. The jobs figure will be tested over the hiring period; the state's money, as usual, is structured to follow performance rather than precede it.
The state package is structured to be earned: the Industrial Development Authority loan and grants are tied to the jobs and investment the company committed to, the standard protection when public money follows a private site decision. Local officials, having reviewed the blueprints for months, now move to permits and hiring, the phase where announcements become payrolls.
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