idX delay could result in additional jobs, operations relocation

Published 5:58 pm Monday, February 1, 2016

Washington’s City Council, during its Jan. 25 meeting, authorized the mayor to take steps necessary to request a one-year extension of a $500,000 grant awarded to help idX/Impressions expand its facility in the city.

The building-reuse grant was awarded by the N.C. Rural Infrastructure Authority on Dec. 18, 2014.

“The grant was for renovations at the idX/Impressions building. As a requirement of the grant, idX had to create 50 jobs. They’ve created 39 of the 50 jobs as of this date,” said Kevin Richards with the Mid-East Commission, which is administering the grant, during the council’s meeting last week. “There’s been a delay in construction. A local industry was doing the design, but corporate took over the design, and it’s taken longer than they thought. We talked to the grant agency, and they would be amenable to the city applying for a one-year extension.”

The Impressions project’s estimated cost is $1.14 million. Grant terms required the city to provide a 5-percent match to the project. The city’s sale of the building to idX in April 2014 satisfies that requirement, according to a city document.

According to a document, idX/Impressions plans to expand its operations and work force during the next several years, adding full-time 50 jobs to a baseline of an existing 109 jobs. An office area that has been unused for 15 years would be renovated and used for expanding the facility’s office space, according to that document.

The project, as initially planned, would expand the facility by 25,000 square feet. It will include a training center and showroom. More than half of the new jobs will be in the manufacturing section.

“The lengthy delay is the result of idX Corporate taking away the design portion of the project from the local industry. idX Corporate is in the process of reworking the design with the possibility of reorganizing the company and moving portions of the Baltimore Maryland operation to the Washington, NC facility,” Mayor Mac Hodges wrote in a letter to Hazel Edmond with the North Carolina Department of Commerce.

About Mike Voss

Mike Voss is the contributing editor at the Washington Daily News. He has a daughter and four grandchildren. Except for nearly six years he worked at the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., in the early to mid-1990s, he has been at the Daily News since April 1986.
Journalism awards:
• Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service, 1990.
• Society of Professional Journalists: Sigma Delta Chi Award, Bronze Medallion.
• Associated Press Managing Editors’ Public Service Award.
• Investigative Reporters & Editors’ Award.
• North Carolina Press Association, First Place, Public Service Award, 1989.
• North Carolina Press Association, Second Place, Investigative Reporting, 1990.
All those were for the articles he and Betty Gray wrote about the city’s contaminated water system in 1989-1990.
• North Carolina Press Association, First Place, Investigative Reporting, 1991.
• North Carolina Press Association, Third Place, General News Reporting, 2005.
• North Carolina Press Association, Second Place, Lighter Columns, 2006.
Recently learned he will receive another award.
• North Carolina Press Association, First Place, Lighter Columns, 2010.
4. Lectured at or served on seminar panels at journalism schools at UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Maryland, Columbia University, Mary Washington University and Francis Marion University.