"So it's not bricks and mortar — although we celebrate bricks and mortar today — but we're really celebrating all of you and what you've done," he told the crowd. "So it was a very easy decision to leave the company in Utah, because all of you are here. It turned out to be the best acquisition and certainly the best investment in Cephalon's short life in the industry."

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. commended Cephalon for "creating jobs and bringing industry to this state" as well as "improving lives, improving the human condition."

"I'm here to tell you that you're looking and sitting in the halls of one industry for tomorrow," Huntsman said. "It is an intellectual property economy that we live in, and if we keep the brainpower here, we win. If the brainpower leaves because other states are more competitive or have better schools or if the grass is greener with more economic opportunity, we lose."

The governor said Baldino could have put the Salt Lake operations in any of several biotechnology centers.

"But he came here, and it encourages me to no end when I hear the reasons for it really are the people, and so all of you sitting in this room and standing around this room should take heart of the fact that this state has been hand-selected by a company like Cephalon to do its work here because of you, but also because of the University of Utah and the enormous research, the powerful research, the intellectual property that's being developed and that's going to drive our economy as we move into the future."

The state did its part to land the expansion in Utah. The company had received Industrial Assistance Fund approval for $2.1 million in early 2004 but ran into delays in getting the expansion going. This spring, the Governor's Office of Economic Development Board reworked the Cephalon incentive, switching it to a tax rebate of up to $2.1 million, tied to 365 new full-time jobs that the company said at the time would pay an average of about $63,570.

Construction of the new building resulted in the elimination of 1.5 acres of wetlands, but Cephalon purchased and donated 22 acres of wetlands to the Audubon Society of the Great Salt Lake.

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E-mail: bwallace@desnews.com