An industrial-use pump manufacturer has purchased Radiall’s former factory buildings on John Murphy Drive in Fair Haven for $3.2 million — with plans eventually to hire enough people to replace many of the New Haven jobs lost there.
According to the city land records database, that sale took place on Dec. 11 last year, when IFS Real Estate LLC bought the 25,000 square-foot industrial building at 90 John W. Murphy Dr. and the 40,300 square-foot industrial building at 104 John W. Murphy Dr. (pictured above) from Radiall USA Inc.
IFS Real Estate LLC is a holding company owned by the Chicago-based Industrial Flow Solutions.
According to the company’s website, IFS designs, manufactures, sells, and services “highly effective pumping and fluid management solutions for harsh, rugged environments”—also known as, industrial and commercial-use pumps.
City Deputy Economic Development Director Steve Fontana said that IFS decided to purchase the recently vacated industrial buildings just on the eastern banks of the Mill River as an opportunity to relocate two Connecticut-based companies IFS owns, along with several dozen employees, to a single New Haven site.
Fontana estimated that IFS will employ around 50 to 70 people to start once it moves into the New Haven buildings later this spring. He said the company plans to expand its business nationally and make significant investments in both equipment, staff, and repairs at the John Murphy Drive locations.
Radiall, a Paris-based manufacturer of coaxial connectors, antennas, and fiber optic cables, has moved its industrial and office work and its nearly 100 employees to a former Webster Bank call center building in Wallingford.
Fontana said that the day-to-day work that will take place at the IFS-owned New Haven site will involve the manufacture of industrial-use pumps, he said. He said an example that IFS often uses when describing the company’s work is that poultry farms down south need some safe and effective way to dispose of chicken waste. Pumps that IFS produces provide a vehicle for disposing of such waste.
“This is a very exciting development,” Fontana said about IFS’s purchase.
“We want to have jobs at all sorts of skill levels,” he said. While New Haven’s bioscience and biotech economy is currently booming, he said, the city’s economy should also include plenty of “blue-collar manufacturing jobs” open to workers with a variety of educational backgrounds. IFS represents just such a hiring opportunity.
Click here to download a presentation that city staff gave to alders last fall about IFS’s purchase of the former Radiall property.
That presentation notes that IFS will make $385,000 in real of personal property investments across the two buildings and adjacent lot on the 1.84-acre site over the next three years. It says will add up to 14 jobs to the New Haven site over the next four years, and that IFS will work with the city to adjust its property fence lines to accommodate the nearby Mill River Trail.
A representative from IFS did not respond to a request for comment by the publication time of this article.
Radiall Vice-President Bill Neale told the Independent Wednesday morning that his company decided to leave New Haven after 12 years at the John Murphy Drive site not because of any problems with the city, but because the company simply found a better fit at a former call center building in Wallingford.
‘We didn’t move out of New Haven for any negative reasons about New Haven,” he stressed. He said Radiall needed a “bigger clean room” as well as a “much more lab-like atmosphere.”
Neale said that Radiall also wanted to lease rather than own its regional site. “You take the sale price that we got an invest in new products and then expense the lease every month,” he said.
Neale added that Radiall prioritized retaining its nearly 100 employees when deciding where to move from New Haven. When looking for a new building, the company drew a 15-mile radius around New Haven, and ended up at the Wallingford site.
