Developer shelves plan to buy city land, build Meijer
Opus Development Corp.’s proposal for the project north of downtown included buying and bulldozing dozens of historic homes in the Flanner House neighborhood.
Opus Development Corp.’s proposal for the project north of downtown included buying and bulldozing dozens of historic homes in the Flanner House neighborhood.
Plans for the plant, officially announced Wednesday, call for an environmentally friendly facility outside of Martinsville that could produce 650 megawatts of power. Construction could employ 660 workers.
The retail chain Meijer hopes to build a store near 16th and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. streets north of downtown as part of a mixed-use project by Opus Development Corp.
Pedcor Cos. wants to apply for a state tax credit to help fund an upscale $100 million housing and office development in Carmel’s Midtown. But City Council members are holding it at arm’s length for now.
Eli Lilly and Co. wants the city of Indianapolis to give it $30.6 million in tax breaks on a $400 million project that includes a new manufacturing facility and improvements to existing operations downtown. The Metropolitan Development Commission will weigh two Lilly requests for 10-year tax abatements at its meeting at 1 p.m. Wednesday. Over the last several months, the pharmaceuticals giant has rolled out plans for a manufacturing plant southwest of downtown where the firm will manufacture cartridges for insulin. Construction is already under way for the 164,000-square-foot plant on South Harding Street, adjoining Lilly’s existing manufacturing complex known as Lilly Technology Center. Lilly’s investment in the project is estimated at $320 million. In addition, it is planning a new inspection facility that will add another 30,000 square feet to the project, plus renovations to existing buildings on the Lilly Technology Center campus and the Lilly Corporate Center. As a result of the project, the firm said it will be able to retain 175 Indianapolis employees who will earn an average of $30.96 per hour, according to the abatement requests. Over the 10-year period of the two abatements, Lilly still would pay $22.2 million in taxes on the new construction, renovations and equipment.
Matrix-Bio Inc., a Fort Wayne-based diagnostics company, has signed a licensing and marketing agreement for a breast cancer test with New Jersey-based giant Quest Diagnostics. Under the agreement, Quest will have the rights to use metabolic breast cancer biomarkers developed by Matrix-Bio to create a new lab test to detect the recurrence of breast cancer. Quest will co-fund clinical studies with Matrix-Bio and, if those are successful, market the test as a lab service in the United States and other countries. Quest also has the option to pursue an appropriate regulatory pathway for an in vitro diagnostic version of the test. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Two Purdue University professors have received a $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to understand why some children grow out of stuttering. They will use their findings to develop a speech therapy screening tool to identify which preschool children are not likely to recover from stuttering and should receive therapy immediately. Professors Anne Smith and Christine Weber-Fox will use the five-year grant to follow 100 children who stutter. Their research, which began with Smith in 1988, has been funded by the NIH's National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders for more than 25 years and has received more than $13 million in grant awards.
Ball State University's School of Nursing is partnering with Indianapolis-based hospital system Community Health Network to create the Nursing Academy, an accelerated degree program designed to increase the number of registered nurses in Indiana. The Nursing Academy will kick off this fall by offering students classes at Ball State, online and via video conferencing. Its students also will work at Community’s eight hospitals. The Community Health Network Foundation will fund scholarships for the 24 students representing the academy's inaugural class. The academy hopes to ramp up to enroll 48 students each year.
Indianapolis development officials on Wednesday will weigh the 10-year requests from the pharmaceuticals giant related to a new manufacturing plant and improvements to existing operations downtown.
Hoosier Energy will invest about $27 million in 83,000-square-foot facility. The city of Bloomington has approved a 10-year tax abatement for the project.
Northern Indiana's recreational vehicle industry is getting a boost with the relocation of RV components producer Drew Industries Inc. to Elkhart and its pledge of up to 800 new jobs by 2017.
After six years of unsuccessfully recommending measures that could have made it easier for a suitor to acquire Eli Lilly and Co., the drugmaker’s board has given up this year. The board decided not to place two measures before shareholders again during Lilly’s May 6 annual meeting—one to require annual election of directors and another to remove an 80-percent super-majority requirement to approve a takeover of the company. In a proxy statement filed in March, the board said it opted against another vote because “we have concluded that the proposals would not be successful in 2013.”
Indiana University Health set a goal this year to cut expenses 20 percent to 25 percent over the next four years. That’s $1 billion to $1.2 billion annually, based on IU Health’s expenses last year. Even though President Obama’s 2010 health reform law likely will expand health insurance coverage to an extra 500,000 Hoosiers over the next few years, IU Health officials expect the amount the hospital system receives per patient to fall as the federal government, employers and patients all push back on sky-high health care costs. Most other hospitals are in the same boat. Community Health Network—whose Indianapolis market share is second only to IU Health’s—started trying to cut its expenses back in 2009, even before the health reform law passed. It set a goal to trim $300 million—about 20 percent of expenses—by 2015. Community is more than one-third of the way toward its goal, progress it achieved by streamlining its supply chain and leaving many vacant positions unfilled. It is now focusing on cutting waste out of its internal processes.
The city of Indianapolis is poised to pay Citizens Energy Group $6.5 million to buy a 19-acre parcel of real estate it’s targeting as the centerpiece of a life sciences corridor called 16 Tech. The site at 1220 Waterway Blvd. would accommodate about 1 million square feet of space for a single tenant or multiple users, said Deron Kintner, executive director of the Indianapolis Bond Bank. He is promoting the property as an ideal location for the proposed life-sciences-focused research institute supported by Gov. Mike Pence and Eli Lilly and Co. CEO John Lechleiter. Real estate developers and brokers say the city’s purchase of the Citizens property could help cement 16 Tech as an attractive option for life sciences and research firms looking to locate or expand in Indianapolis.
WellPoint Inc.’s top brass all enjoyed double-digit bumps in 2012 compensation, according to a proxy released April 2, even though the company’s stock price fell and it admittedly did not meet its financial goals. The Indianapolis-based health insurer’s board approved higher salaries and larger potential stock awards heading into 2012 after most of its top executives saw their pay hold steady or decline in 2011. The company’s performance merited its executives' receiving only 83 percent of their target stock awards. But because the board had already established larger pools of stock to award to executives, the value of those awards still rose over previous years. Bonus amounts fell in 2012 compared with the previous year. Former CEO Angela Braly received compensation of $20.6 million last year after she was allowed to stay on as an employee until year's end so that additional stock awards kicked in. WellPoint spokeswoman Kristin Binns said WellPoint achieved important goals in 2012.
Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business will launch a new MBA program for midcareer physicians in an attempt to help doctors figure out how to curb the health care industry’s soaring costs. According to Bloomberg News, about 30 students will join the program in its first year. Their first course will discuss the policy changes coming to health care as a result of President Obama’s 2010 health reform law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Unlike most MD-MBA programs, which target medical students, the Business of Medicine MBA is only for currently practicing doctors who are around 40 to 55 years old and are taking on greater accountability for patient outcomes and costs.
Eli Lilly and Co. plans to double the size of a manufacturing plant already under construction southwest of downtown, investing another $180 million on insulin production and related products. The Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical giant announced in November that it would spend $140 million to construct an 80,000-square-foot plant for filling cartridges for insulin-injecting pens. The plant, on South Harding Street, adjoins the existing manufacturing complex known as Lilly Technology Center. The new $180 million investment would add 84,000 square feet to the project, allowing Lilly to add another cartridge-filling line, the firm announced Tuesday. The space also would be used to increase Lilly’s manufacturing capacity for the active ingredient in insulin. About 175 workers will staff the plant once it’s in full operation. The jobs will be filled by existing and new employees, according to Lilly spokesman Ed Sagebiel. In addition, Lilly is planning several other projects for its Indianapolis operations totaling $80 million, including a $40 million product-inspection center. The firm has submitted a request to city officials for a tax abatement on the full $400 million investment, between the two phases of the new plant and ancillary projects, Sagebiel said. Lilly’s request calls for a 10-year abatement that would save the firm $30 million. Construction of the production area for insulin’s active ingredient could be complete by December and in operation by March 2014, according to the company. Work on the additional cartridge filling line could be finished by 2016.
The new investment will bring the plant’s total price tag to $320 million as the pharmaceutical giant seeks to increase production of insulin and related products.
The Indianapolis-based trucking firm first announced plans for the driver-education center in January, but has since expanded the project and employment projections while seeking state incentives.
Indianapolis-based trucking carrier Celadon Group Inc. and the state are set to make an announcement Tuesday morning “regarding hundreds of new jobs.” A source familiar with the deal said the announcement involves a previously announced driver education center.
The Indiana Family and Social Services Administration will hold two public hearings this week on using the Healthy Indiana Plan to expand Medicaid coverage in Indiana. The hearings must be held before the federal government will consider Indiana’s special request to use the Healthy Indiana Plan as opposed to expanding its traditional Medicaid program. "After completing a preliminary review of your extension request, we have determined that the state's extension request has not met the requirements for a complete extension request," wrote Diane Gerrits, director of the CMS' division of state demonstrations and waivers, in a Feb. 25 letter to Gov. Mike Pence. That response sparked criticism of Pence from Democratic lawmakers, who said Pence’s strategy makes it unlikely the state Legislature will have a decision from the feds before they have to adopt a two-year budget at the end of April. “We have considerable concerns as to whether this will hamper the state’s ability to inject billions of dollars of federal funds into Indiana’s economy, create tens of thousands of jobs and give hundreds of thousands of Hoosiers a plan to receive affordable health care services,” wrote House Minority Leader Scott Pelath, D-Michigan City, and Senate Minority Leader Tim Lanane, D-Anderson, in a letter to Pence. They even asked if Pence would call a special session of the Legislature to deal with the Medicaid expansion. Pence spokeswoman Christy Denault said the administration always knew they had to hold public hearings but was trying to get an approval as soon as possible because of a June deadline.
Bloomington-based Cook Medical Inc. launched a new set of minimally invasive products to treat obstructive salivary gland disease and, it's hoped, stave off the need for open surgeries. The most prevalent obstructive salivary gland disease is obstruction by salivary duct stones. It’s a disease that affects twice as many men as women. Cook, which launched the products as part of its newly formed division for otolaryngology and head and neck surgery, said physicians can use its products to perform outpatient surgeries to remove salivary stones.
Fishers-based Nexxt Spine LLC, a designer and manufacturer of spinal implants, is consolidating operations and moving its headquarters and manufacturing facility to Noblesville. The city of Noblesville announced Monday that its Common Council approved a three-year tax abatement for Nexxt Spine, which is expected to add 44 jobs by 2018. The company currently has 11 employees split between its headquarters in Fishers and a manufacturing facility in Indianapolis. Nexxt Spine was founded in 2009 by Andrew Elsbury, who previously had served as a contract manufacturer for several large medical-device companies.
St. Vincent Indianapolis Hospital recently earned verification as a trauma center by the American College of Surgeons. It is now the fourth trauma center in Indianapolis designated by the American College of Surgeons and the ninth in Indiana. To prepare for the verification, St. Vincent renovated space for trauma, surgical and neuroscience intensive care units and added CT scan imaging equipment. The hospital also dedicated one of its operating rooms for trauma and added in-house physician coverage for trauma surgery, anesthesia, critical care and radiology. To ensure air transportation was readily available, St. Vincent Health arranged an affiliation agreement with PHI Air Medical called St. Vincent StatFlight. The service has five medical helicopters in Anderson, Danville, North Vernon, Rushville and West Lafayette.
Officers from the Indiana State Excise Police and the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department's Nuisance Abatement Unit raided the Early Bird Bar & Grill on the city's northwest side early Sunday morning.
Chicago-based Peer Foods Group Inc., a meat producer and distributor, said Wednesday that it plans to create 80 jobs by 2014 as part of a $5.5 million expansion into Hancock County.
Fishers-based Nexxt Spine LLC, a manufacturer of spinal implants, is consolidating operations and moving its headquarters and manufacturing facility to Noblesville.
Tinderbox said it is boosting its work force as part of a $540,000 expansion of its cloud-based IT business.
Fast-growing Indianapolis company is pushing to fill a vacuum in the housing market.
Ambrose Property Group will break ground next month on its first industrial project, a 545,010-square-foot national distribution center for Gordmans Inc.
Automotive supplier Valeo expects to invest $15.5 million in new machinery for its Greensburg facility as part of its plans to expand operations in the plant and bring more than 200 workers onto the company payroll by 2014.