Explanation
This was the first of two-story package on the expansion of Ballard Medical Products, a Utah-based manufacturer of soaps and disposable medical implements for use in hospitals, into Pocatello. It was by far the biggest economic news to hit Southeast Idaho in 1996.

Unemployment attracts new business
Tight labor market in Utah has companies looking north for expansion

By Arik Hesseldahl
Of The Journal

When Ballard Medical Products of Draper, Utah chose Pocatello as the place to build its new $7 million assembly plant, city officials and economic developers saw Ballard as the biggest boon to the Pocatello economy in several years.

Ballard officials selected Pocatello over several other places in the Intermountain west — including Idaho Falls — as the best place for its needed expansion because of an ever-shrinking labor pool along Utah's Wasatch Front.

But Ballard may be only the first of several Utah companies that may give Pocatello and the rest of eastern Idaho a serious look as they consider expansion.

"Our efficiency is down and we needed to expand someplace. We just can't hire any more good people down here because the unemployment rate is too low," Ballard President and CEO Dale Ballard said of the expansion.

Unemployment rates in the Salt Lake city area have dipped into the 2 percent range, and that may be good news for the Pocatello area, where the rate has stayed at about 5 percent for the last several years, said Tom Arnold, executive director of Bannock Development Corporation, which helped convince Ballard to come to Pocatello.

With last week's announcement by Micron Technology Inc. that its new plant in Lehi will be twice the size originally planned and may eventually need considerably more than the 3,500 workers it called for initially. Micron's labor demand are likely to stretch Utah's already depleted workforce to the limit and force other manufacturers to look at Pocatello and its surrounding communities for expansion sites.

"Utah has perhaps invited more than they can handle," Arnold said.

Arnold said Utah's struggle with its blistering pace of economic growth has led him and other officials to be cautious when trying to attract new industrial employers to the area.

"We have to be selective because we want to make sure that Ballard and (American Microsystems Inc.) have they employees they need," he said.

And Ballard is not likely to be the last Utah company too come to Pocatello. Arnold said two other manufacturing companies are in the final stages of deciding on a move into the Pocatello area. Arnold would not name the companies, saying only that one would employ about 20 people and that the other is much larger.

And Pocatello's location at the intersection of Interstate 15 and Interstate 86 makes it a consistently attractive site for manufactures, said Paul Zelus, director of the Center for Business Research at Idaho State University.

"It's possible that Ballard is only the tip of the iceberg. Development tends to leapfrog along the main arteries," Zelus said.