on March 17, 2016

With the addition of Airbus's $600 million aircraft manufacturing plant and ongoing activity at Austal USA and other industrial facilities in South Alabama, a need is growing for skilled workers.

According to the Alabama Community College SystemChancellor Mark Heinrich, if 6,000 workers were properly trained in high-tech manufacturing jobs, "they would be employed immediately."

A new $2 million to $4 million workforce training facility at the Mobile Aeroplex at Brookley south of downtown Mobile, is expected to serve that role.

A national trade publication has named the $1.3 billion expansion at the Mercedes-Benz auto plant in Vance as one of the 30 winners of its 2016 Corporate Investment & Community Impact Awards.

The editors of Trade & Industry Development magazine gave Mercedes-Benz a corporate investment award for the expansion project announced last fall. The Mercedes project was one of three Alabama projects from 2015 that received one of the magazine's awards.

The magazine evaluated hundreds of projects from across the U.S. before selecting 30 projects in the 11th year in which it has given the awards.

Chambers County has been named one of the Top-10 micropolitan communities in the U.S. for new and expanding facilities by Site Selection magazine, the official publication of the Global FDI Association and the Industrial Asset Management Council. The magazine ranked 575 of the nation's micropolitan areas.

The US Census Bureau designates a micropolitan area as a non-urban community anchored by a town of no more than 50,000 people. Valley is the anchor town for Chambers County, and statistical information presented for it is representative of the county as a whole.

The magazine used the Conway New Plant Database measuring the number of corporate facility projects to determine the rankings. Chambers County ranked eight in 2015, making a big jump from 2014 when the county was ranked 74th out of 575 micropolitans.

more....

[The LaFayette Sun]

By Dana Beyerle

MARCH 15, 2016 

It's October 1941. Alabama headlines follow the war in Europe and Asia. On Oct. 11, less than two months from U.S. entry into the World War II, the Alabama Research Institute is formed in Birmingham with the challenge to produce innovative research for the South.

An early contract is with the National Peanut Council to develop a way to homogenize peanut butter. But as fate would have it, the war halts everything until 1944 when ARI begins its work in earnest.

Today Business Council of Alabama member Southern Research, as ARI is now known, is celebrating its Diamond Anniversary as a heralded scientific and engineering research organization involved in pre-clinical drug discovery and development, energy and environment initiatives, and engineering research including sensor systems and advanced materials - think space vehicle reentry heat shields.