Maryland officials believe they are close to winning out over Pennsylvania in the intense competition for a planned 100- to 200-worker McCormick & Co. Inc., spice distribution center.
"It's not a done deal, but we expect that it will be within a couple of weeks," said James T. Brady, Gov. Parris N. Glendening's secretary-designate of economic development.
The month-old Glendening administration embraced McCormick's search for the warehousing and trucking center as an early test of its ability to erase Maryland's reputation as an anti-business state.
It has spent the past three weeks "refining and fine-tuning" a package of incentives in talks with officers of the company, Mr. Brady said.
"Maryland is very definitely in the ball game," based on its incentive package, said Alan D. Wilson, McCormick's vice president for procurement, who heads the site search.
Details of the Maryland package have not been revealed, but it is "fully competitive" with Pennsylvania's proposals, though the elements are different, Mr. Brady said.
Pennsylvania's inducements are known to have included a $2 million low-interest loan.
Early in the search, Pennsylvania newspapers also reported that the company might receive a real estate tax holiday beginning with a tax-free year, then phase up to normal taxes in 10-percent annual increments.
Immediately at stake is where the Hunt Valley-based spice giant will put a new consolidated warehouse and trucking center, which would open by the end of this year with some 150 workers and might eventually be expanded to 200 or more if spice blending, packaging and light manufacturing operations are added later.
But the Glendening administration believes the issues are bigger even than the jobs that might leave the state.
Given the deep local roots of a company that has its headquarters and 2,000 workers in Maryland, the administration sees any loss of McCormick jobs as a symbolic disaster that could set the wrong tone for its avowed intention of turning around the state's reputation for losing too many rounds in economic development competition with its neighbors.
The governor and Mr. Brady also have voiced concern that if the company establishes an operation outside Maryland, further losses could follow over the years.
McCormick's move from Baltimore's Inner Harbor to Hunt Valley happened much that way -- a few installations at a time over more than two decades, until the firm finally sold its Light Street plant to the Rouse Company and moved its last few hundred employees to Baltimore county in 1989. The Light Street site is now a parking lot.
McCormick narrowed its list of potential sites two weeks ago from six to three, two in Maryland and one in Pennsylvania. Maryland sites are White Marsh in Baltimore County and Riverside Business Park in Harford County. The Pennsylvania site is near Shrewsbury.
"One of the things that they're waiting for right now is designs that will let them see what kind of building can be put on each site and how each will fit into their trucking operations and how they will relate to Hunt Valley," said Andrew Georgelakos, an agent for KLNB Inc., who represents McCormick.
The White Marsh and Shrewsbury sites are about equally distant from McCormick's existing Hunt Valley complex, about 23 miles. The Harford County site is about 39 miles from Hunt Valley but, "is more flexible in the type of building it can take than White vTC Marsh is," Mr. Georgelakos said. The Shrewsbury site also is flexible, but has "the disadvantage of being in a brand-new industrial park, so that McCormick wouldn't know who its future neighbors might be," he said.
White Marsh will be the site if McCormick chooses Maryland, sources familiar with the negotiations said earlier this week. Mr. Wilson and Mr. Georgelakos yesterday disputed that claim. "All of the [three] sites on the short list are still as much in the running as they ever have been," Mr. Wilson said.
"We have not made a decision at this time. We are probably one or two weeks from being in a position to announce a decision," he said.