Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
The former Harrell Nut Company building in the industrial park is beginning to show activity, a sign that its new owner, Alpha Foundations (AF), is planning to occupy the premises in the not too distant future.
AF, which is currently based in Tallahassee, is a multimillion dollar full-service foundations repair company that specializes in residential, commercial and industrial foundation services, mostly in Florida and South Georgia. It purchased the Harrell building for about $1.5 million early last year with the intention of relocating its headquarters to Jefferson County, having outgrown its Tallahassee location.
Lisa Scully, AF's marketing director, told the Monticello News earlier this week that the current activity at the industrial park involved renovations to the building's interior to better accommodate AF's needs. She said that AF's planned move into the building, however, would be a little later than originally anticipated.
“We're hoping it will be in six months,” Scully said on Monday,
Oct. 28. “It will now probably be in in late spring.”
The timeframe for the move was originally expected to be in November or December of this year.
Although the company employs about 100 people overall, Scully said only the office staff, which consists of about 20 individuals, would be occupying the industrial park site. The rest of the employees, she said, would remain stationed throughout AF's service area, which, incidentally, just grew larger.
Scully shared that as of Monday, Oct. 21, AF had acquired another foundations repair company in Naples, Fla.
“So we'll also now be covering South Florida,” she said.
Heretofore, the company's service area had extended from Jacksonville, Fla., on the east; to Mobile, Ala., on the west; to Macon, Ga., on the north; to Gainesville in Central Florida.
Despite the expanded territory, however, Monticello would remain the company's headquarters, Scully said.
Earlier this year, in the spring, AF reportedly celebrated its planned move here by holding its annual family-oriented party at the industrial park site, complete with carnival games, a bounce house, and mechanical hog and other entertainment.
Constructed in 2012 by the Georgia-based Harrell Nut Company, which had plans to start a second nut-shelling operation here, the company never lived up to its promises. Shortly after relocating a small contingency of its Georgia workforce here, the Harrell Nut Company sold the operation to Golden Peanut and Tree Nut, a Fortune 500 Company and subsidiary of the Chicago-based Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM).
In 2014, ADM shuttered the operation, leaving the building vacant until AF's purchase.
A multimillion award-winning company founded in 2002, AF specializes in leveling foundations, stabilizing structures and repairing cracked, bowing and buckling foundation walls, as well as repairing crawl spaces, seawalls and sinkholes.