CULLMAN — After shuttering its doors nearly two years ago, a local metal casting company plans to reopen in Cullman within the next two months — creating more than 100 jobs by next year.

Officials with Cullman Casting, a division of Indiana-based North Vernon Industries Corporation (NVIC), plan to return to operation by the end of November with at least 60 employees, and hire twice that many by summer 2011.

The company, which manufactures counterweights for forklifts and off-road vehicles, will begin test production in November and ramp up to full force in January 2011. Cullman Casting will return to their former, 100,000-square-foot facility off Golf Course Road, which has been vacant since they shut down operations in late 2008.

With a significant increase in production over the past year, coupled with a buyout by Toyota Industry Corp. in January, officials said the decision was made to re-open the Cullman facility to meet increased demand.

“We’ve been blessed with a lot of return to our business sector, and we’ve had a very strong year, with levels far exceeding our capacity,” NVIC vice-president Jack Bodi said. “It looks like the future forecast for our market is that it will continue to grow through 2011, which justified the investment to reopen the facility in Cullman ... We’re just looking forward to coming back to the community, and to being a part of Cullman, again.”

As the economy has improved, Bodi said product demand has more than doubled over the past year.

“We’ve probably grown as significantly as we declined in 2008,” he said. “In Indiana we’ve doubled the number of associates we’ve had since March; that’s how much our business has grown. Once we open up, we think we’ll probably have to add a full second shift in Cullman by June 2011.”

Cullman Casting originally opened in Cullman around early 2006, but economic conditions forced them to close the local plant and shift more operations back to their main offices in Indiana in late 2008.

“Our business was cut nearly in half,” Bodi said. “That’s why we had to consolidate.”

Before closing, the company kept local employees on payroll for several months, ferrying them back and forth to Indiana in an effort to maintain those jobs.

“We had Cullman employees working in Indiana up through August 2009, and we tried to keep them on as long as we possibly could,” Bodi said. “We put a lot of time into training and developing those people, and we felt like we had an obligation to try and stick to that as much as we could. But, because of the prolonged downturn, we just couldn’t maintain that any longer.”

With the plant now set to reopen, company officials say they plan to call back as many of those former employees as possible.

“That is our first focus, those employees,” Bodi said. “Before we posted the ad in the paper about jobs, we directly called all of our original Cullman Casting employees. Our first thoughts are to hire back as many of our original people that were laid off, first.”

Cullman Economic Development Agency Director Peggy Smith said she is elated to see Cullman Casting return to the area, as they have always been an excellent corporate citizen.

“They’ve been saying for nearly a year they planned to resume operations in Cullman, and the fact that they carried employees for nine months, really showed they were doing everything they could to support them,” she said. “It’s great news that they’re coming back and we’re really excited about it. They said they’ve been really encouraged by what they’ve seen in the economy lately, and we’re glad things have changed so they can come back and do what they need to do.”



‰ Trent Moore can be reached by e-mail at trentm@cullmantimes.com, or by telephone at 734-2131, ext. 220.