Sewer Equipment will build distribution center in Dixon business park

DIXON – Sewer Equipment Company of America, which 12 years ago moved from Chadwick to the Lee County Business Park, recently bought a second nearby parcel upon which it will build a parts distribution center.

As Progress Drive Properties LLC, the company in late January paid the Lee County Industrial Development Association $172,750 for a nearly 7-acre undeveloped site just west of Lee Ogle Transportation System, at 210 E. Progress Drive, and southeast of Sewer Equipment’s current facility at 1590 Dutch Road.

Site preparation for the new, $3.5 million, 23,000-square-foot building will begin next month; it will be finished in October or November, President John Wichmann said Monday.

Opening a distribution center will allow Sewer Equipment to “create more focus on our aftermarket, which will allow us to focus all of our efforts here [at the current facility] on production,” Wichmann said.

In 2013, the company, which makes sewer and drain-cleaning equipment, vacuum trucks and trailers and hydro-excavators, moved into to the former 125,000-square-foot Johnson Controls building, which it bought from Johnson for $1.7 million and which had been empty three years.

A recently completed, $5 million expansion has added 35,000 square feet.

It also owns Rock Rental in Clinton, Iowa.

Sewer Equipment has been able to offset some of the costs with EDGE grant money. The Illinois Economic Development for a Growing Economy is a Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunity program that requires job creation and investment and results in “annual corporate tax credits to qualifying businesses which support job creation, capital investment and improve the standard of living for all Illinois residents.”

The $8.5 million investment is “a testament” to the strength of Dixon’s local business landscape, LCIDA Executive Director Tom Demmer said, noting other business expansions in the park.

In September, for example, a little more than a year after buying the former 575,000-square-foot Rayovac battery distribution center, Raynor Garage Doors opened a “cutting-edge manufacturing and distribution facility” at 200 E. Corporate Drive.

Bonnell Industries, which makes and distributes snowplows and spreaders, leaf blowers, multipurpose truck bodies and road maintenance equipment, also built a $10.7 million, 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility on about 9 acres off East Progress Drive, next to Nicor at 320 E. Progress and not far from Raynor’s new facility.

City Manager Danny Langloss agrees.

“It’s just impressive that companies continue to invest in Dixon,” Langloss said, noting other recent developments in the park, and the nearby burgeoning Gateway development on South Galena Avenue. “I think that just speaks volumes about our community and what it’s like to do business here.”

The 83-year-old company had been at 12 Howard St. in Chadwick 20 years, and in Maquoketa Iowa, for 20 years before that. It started life in Chicago.

The move doubled its amount of production floor space, said Wichmann, who was vice president of production at the time.

The privately held company was founded in 1941 by H.T. O’Brien in a garage in Park Ridge. O’Brien began with a simple invention, a tool to unclog kitchen sinks, he invented in his garage using a hand drill he connected to a 2-foot piece of flexible cable, which he discovered could “safely and effectively open a clogged kitchen sink, better than anything he had ever used,” the company said on its website.

“He built a few dozen of these tools, put them in the trunk of his car, and drove into Chicagoland to call on plumbers, hospitals, restaurants and hotels. Soon, a company was born.”

The company moved from Chicago to Maquoketa in the early 1970s, and to Chadwick in the 1980s.

In June, it manufactured its 10,000th unit, a Model 900 ECO combination sewer cleaner truck.