Heartland adding to Whitehall’s rebound
It’s fitting that a community bank is playing a role in a major community-revitalization project as Heartland Bank prepares to move into a new headquarters building on Hamilton Road in Whitehall.
The company expects to move 107 workers into the office and is looking to hire more. The $10 million project is designed to accommodate continued, steady growth over the next several years.
Move-in is to start at the end of December and be completed in January. The building, which benefits from ample natural light from glass walls, is two stories and has 60,000 square feet.
It will offer such sought-after perks as a fitness facility and a coffee bar developed with Columbus-based coffee-maker Crimson Cup. An open-plan cafe where employees can have informal meetings or work on laptops will feature retractable glass doors that can open in good weather to a patio area overlooking a park.
“We've grown at our current headquarters over the years by adding on, but there's only so many times you can do that,” said G. Scott McComb, chairman, president and CEO. “This will allow us to be more efficient and serve our customers better.”
Heartland, which has its headquarters in Gahanna, looked at a number of sites before striking a deal with Whitehall, which is in the midst of an ambitious overhaul of the suburb's economicdevelopment efforts.
Heartland originally planned to renovate and move into the historic former Port Columbus terminal building on 5th Avenue, close to the new site. McComb said that deal fell through because the census tract that includes the airport has no residents, which caused the project to score too low on a key measure of community
impact to qualify for state historic tax credits that were critical to making the financial numbers work.
The move allows Heartland to consolidate workers who are spread among locations in Grove City, New Albany, Reynoldsburg and Westerville as well as Gahanna.
The building will include 10 conference rooms and a bank branch (Heartland's 15th in central Ohio) with a drive-through window, something that McComb says is a benefit for both customers and workers.
“These days, you have to find ways to interact with the customer face to face,” McComb said. Even with many banking functions now being done electronically, nothing replaces meeting with customers, he said.
The $10 million headquarters is being built on land formerly maintained by Rockwell International as a recreation area for workers when the aerospace firm employed thousands nearby on 5th Avenue. Rockwell sold the parkland to Whitehall for $1 when it left in the early 1990s, with the agreement that it not be used for any non-recreation purpose until after 2014.
Zach Woodruff, Whitehall's economicdevelopment director,
said the city sees Heartland as a “great partner” to anchor the edge of parkland that will see a major investment over the next couple of years. The city granted Heartland a 15-year,
100 percent propertytax abatement and a five-year, 33 percent income-tax reimbursement to land the project.
Heartland paid the city $85,000 for its 5.5-acre site, which
previously housed a parks-maintenance facility that has since been relocated. The money is going to offset the cost of rerouting a walking trail that went through the property and to restore the surrounding area that was disturbed by construction.