By BEN LUNDIN

Staff Reporter

LAPLACE – A Baton Rouge business owner who planned to bring a modular home plant and 370 jobs into LaPlace is relocating to Hammond for a better job market.

Charles Daher, the two-year owner of C.T. Boudreaux Lumber in LaPlace, purchased a 100-acre plot of land in December 2006 on St John Parish’s West Bank to construct a modular home plant but pulled out of the deal to pursue a better employment market Hammond.

However, the plot of land in Hammond has several acres of wetlands that will need to be mitigated by the Army Corps of Engineers at Daher’s expense, and if any issues arise he may build the facility on the LaPlace plot.

In mitigation the Corps’ fills in existing wetlands and later constructs an equal area of wetlands in another location.

The Army Corps of Engineers will assess whether the benefits of the project outweigh the detrimental impact to the environment before issuing mitigation permits, a process that typically takes 120 days, according to Pete Serio, Army Corps of Engineers Acting Chief of the Regulatory Branch in the New Orleans District.

If the risks outweigh the benefits and Daher is denied a permit he will likely build the plant in LaPlace.

If granted permits, Daher expects mitigation on the Hammond plot to be finished in six to eight months, and will begin groundbreaking on his plant roughly two weeks later. The plant will be finished after five months of contruction, he said.

All of the roughly 370 jobs that the plant will bring to Hammond will come with on-site training at the time of employment, with 70 percent being semi-skilled positions.

Daher, a 22-year veteran in the manufacturing industry, decided to build the modular home plant in response to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation.

&#8220I feel I can make a contribution to help rebuild New Orleans,” he said. &#8220The quality of workmanship of a modular home is superior because it’s in a controlled environment and the speed of construction is better. Modular homes can be up in a matter of weeks, whereas regular houses would take anywhere from five to six months.”

Daher’s modular homes will cost between $105 to $110 per square foot on average. Unlike most modular homes, Daher’s will feature a bricked exterior complete with a garage.

The 100-acre plot in LaPlace that Daher initially intended for the modular home plant is part of a 1700-acre tract owned by Don Robert, an Ascension Parish businessman living in Gonzalez.

Robert and his five brothers own the 18 Super Stop convenience stores in the River Parishes.

Carl Monica and Aaron Cross of APC realty brokered the $7.3 million sale of the 1700-acre tract, which was formerly owned by Formosa Chemical and intended to be the location for the company’s rayon plant.

The 1700-acre tract, which has miles of frontage on the Mississippi River and is in close proximity to railways and Interstate 10, will be divided into residential, commercial and light industrial.

Daher’s decision to relocate came with similar reasoning to ThyssenKrupp’s recent choice to construct its steel mill in Alabama rather than St. James Parish. The company cited lower wages and a better job market as two of several reasons it chose Alabama for one the country’s largest private industrial projects in the last decade.

The steel mill was predicted to provide 2,700 permanent jobs and 29,000 temporary positions.