Incentives to woo growing businesses

The Governor's Office of Economic Development hopes financial incentives will woo a medical-device manufacturing company to expand its Utah presence and create more than 1,000 new jobs.

The GOED Board on Thursday voted unanimously to offer Edwards Lifesciences Corp. an incentive of up to $11.5 million over 15 years. In exchange, the company — which makes heart valves and does hemodynamic monitoring and has a small manufacturing facility in Midvale — would move larger manufacturing operations to Draper.

Draper also has provided incentives to the company, which is based in Irvine, Calif.

Incentives would be paid based on performance, which is expected to include the creation of at least 1,000 new jobs and retention of 228 existing Utah jobs. The jobs are expected to be at least 25 percent above the Salt Lake County average salary, including health benefits, and pay more than $776.5 million in new wages over the life of the incentive.

New state tax revenue is expected to exceed $50.9 million if the offer is accepted.

The company has not yet accepted Utah's proposal, and a decision is expected in the next month or so.

The incentive is a mix — including no more than $1.14 million from the Industrial Assistance Fund and up to nearly $10.4 million from an economic-development tax-rebate program.

Edwards has more than 6,200 employees worldwide and had 2008 sales of $1.24 billion. It has manufacturing facilities in Midvale; Irvine, Calif.; the Dominican Republic; Switzerland; Puerto Rico; and Singapore.

GOED incentive committee chairman Jerry Oldroyd said the company has outgrown some of its facilities and will have to move. The incentives are designed to help answer the question "Where?" Should Utah not be selected, the state would probably lose the existing 228 Edwards Lifesciences jobs.

e-mail: lois@desnews.com