Home Care In Alvordton, OH

PIONEER, Ohio — Nearly 300 people attended an Ohio Environmental Protection Agency hearing Monday night at North Central Local High School to weigh in on a discharge permit for what would be one of America’s largest indoor salmon-rearing facilities.

Although AquaBounty Farms Ohio LLC obtained a permit it needs for construction from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the project cannot proceed without the state EPA’s discharge permit.

Nobody from the company spoke at the hearing. Pioneer Mayor Ed Kidston, who owns 83.3 acres the company has agreed to buy and is one of the project’s biggest proponents, listened for the first hour before leaving for a village council meeting without making any comments.

Play Video

Play

Mute

Current Time 0:00

/

Duration Time 0:00

Loaded: 0%

Progress: 0%

Stream TypeLIVE

Remaining Time -0:00

Playback Rate

1

Chapters

Descriptions

Subtitles

Captions

Audio Track

Fullscreen

This is a modal window.

This video is either unavailable or not supported in this browser

Error Code: MEDIA_ERR_SRC_NOT_SUPPORTED

Technical details :

The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.

If you are using an older browser please try upgrading or installing Flash.

Session ID: 2023-09-23:a3cd11e957cb98a680b09ee8 Player ID: vjs_video_3

OK

Close Modal Dialog

Caption Settings Dialog

Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window.

TextColorWhiteWhiteWhiteBlackBlackRedRedGreenGreenBlueBlueYellowYellowMagentaMagentaCyanCyanTransparencyOpaqueOpaqueOpaqueSemi-TransparentSemi-TransparentBackgroundColorBlackBlackBlackWhiteWhiteRedRedGreenGreenBlueBlueYellowYellowMagentaMagentaCyanCyanTransparencyOpaqueOpaqueOpaqueSemi-TransparentSemi-TransparentTransparentTransparentWindowColorBlackBlackBlackWhiteWhiteRedRedGreenGreenBlueBlueYellowYellowMagentaMagentaCyanCyanTransparencyTransparentTransparentTransparentSemi-TransparentSemi-TransparentOpaqueOpaque

Font Size100%50%50%75%75%100%100%125%125%150%150%175%175%200%200%300%300%400%400%

Text Edge StyleNoneNoneNoneRaisedRaisedDepressedDepressedUniformUniformDropshadowDropshadow

Font FamilyProportional Sans-SerifProportional Sans-SerifProportional Sans-SerifMonospace Sans-SerifMonospace Sans-SerifProportional SerifProportional SerifMonospace SerifMonospace SerifCasualCasualScriptScriptSmall CapsSmall Caps

DefaultsDone

Close Modal Dialog

This is a modal window. This modal can be closed by pressing the Escape key or activating the close button.

Tom Henry

AquaBounty Farms Ohio is a subsidiary of Massachusetts-based AquaBounty Technologies. The company hopes to build on a site in Williams County near the nexus of Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana.

Several people identified themselves as residents of the other two states, and said they were concerned about impact on private water wells drawing from the tri-state Michindoh Aquifer. Many people also expressed concerns about western Lake Erie.

AquaBounty plans a daily discharge of about 4.4 million gallons of wastewater treated from the plant and wants a permit that allows discharges of as much as 5.3 million gallons a day. It wants to pull water from the aquifer and discharge it into the St. Joseph River, a Maumee River tributary.

Doug Eisel, who farms 600 acres of corn and soybeans near Alvordton, Ohio, said the St. Joseph occasionally backs up and floods his property.

“Now, they want to dump all of this [wastewater] in the river,” he said, adding that more flooding seems inevitable.

Joyce Konieczny, a Millbury, Ohio, resident with a family farm in Hudson, Mich., read a section of a U.S. EPA guideline that states affected community residents must be consulted whenever there is a project under consideration that could degrade an existing waterway.

“No, we don’t want the quality of our water degraded,” she told the agency.

Tom Henry

Ms. Konieczny also questioned how the Ohio EPA will keep high levels of ammonia and nitrates out of the rivers and, eventually, the lake.

“We're talking about a lot of wastewater,” she said, expressing fear it will send more algae-forming nitrogen to western Lake Erie.

Ohio EPA officials said the company will be required to submit regular samples. But under questioning, they conceded those samples will be mostly self-reported.

Heather Lauer, an Ohio EPA public involvement coordinator who moderated the meeting, had to remind people several times that no decision had been made by that agency and written comments will be accepted through Sept. 19.

“There’s been no decision yet,” Ms. Lauer said. “We are applying what they are asking for to Ohio law.”

Ashley Ward, assistant chief of the Ohio EPA’s surface water division, said the U.S. EPA’s Midwest regional office in Chicago will review any wastewater discharge permit the state agency issues. Permits are issued under what’s known as the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System.

“The NPDES permit will require monitoring,” Ms. Ward said. “All NPDES permit holders take samples.”

Erin Sherer, manager of the Ohio EPA’s permit-to-install and anti-degradation programs, said AquaBounty has proposed recycling 1.5 million gallons of wastewater a day.

“Their production is going to fluctuate,” Ms. Sherer said.

Several residents said they would like to see the company recycle a much higher percentage if it gets an NPDES permit.

The state DNR permit allows the company to withdraw up to 3 million gallons of water from an underground aquifer each day, so long as its consumptive use does not exceed 0.065 million gallons a day.

The salmon farm, which under that construction permit is to be built north of Pioneer in Williams County’s Madison Township, is supported by the Ohio Department of Development and the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority. The latter’s board of directors agreed last October to issue $300 million in bonds to build the salmon farm after being approached by the Williams County Economic Development Corp. and other state and regional officials, including Regional Growth Partnership/Jobs Ohio.

Sylvia Wulf, AquaBounty’s president and chief executive officer, has said in the past that her company takes a “science-based approach” to raise salmon.

“We prioritize the importance of being a good neighbor and our role in providing economic support to Pioneer and Williams County,” she said after the construction permit was issued in March.

AquaBounty spokesmen have said the project is expected to cost $290 million to $320 million, generate 100 to 120 jobs, and yield $15 million over 15 years for schools, primarily those in the North Central Local School District.

Salmon are to be housed in a 479,000-square-foot building to be built on 85 acres inside the recently annexed North Pioneer Industrial Park, eight times as large as AquaBounty’s next-largest facility in Albany, Ind.

As much as 27 million gallons of water is to be kept inside the building at any given time, all of it continually recirculated for the fish.

The plant is expected to produce more than 22 million pounds of fish annually. Only one other salmon farm in the United States, in South Florida, has that kind of capacity.

As it has for about a decade, a Canadian railroad’s holiday-themed special train is slated to roll through southeast Michigan and far northwest Ohio at night this year to take a shortcut from its lines in southwest Ontario to tracks it owns in Illinois.

But when the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train passes through Milan, Adrian, and North Morenci, Mich., on Friday night, followed by fleeting visits to Alvordton, Montpelier, and Blakeslee, Ohio, it may do so this time around without its animated light displays lit.

“For rail security and safety reasons we may turn our lights off through this region,” Andy Cummings, a CP spokesman, said in a prepared statement. “We will not provide details on the timing or route as the train moves between Windsor [Ont.] and Chicago, as there are no stops and these are not CP-owned tracks.”

Play Video

Play

Mute

Current Time 0:00

/

Duration Time 0:00

Loaded: 0%

Progress: 0%

Stream TypeLIVE

Remaining Time -0:00

Playback Rate

1

Chapters

Descriptions

Subtitles

Captions

Audio Track

Fullscreen

This is a modal window.

This video is either unavailable or not supported in this browser

Error Code: MEDIA_ERR_SRC_NOT_SUPPORTED

Technical details :

The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.

If you are using an older browser please try upgrading or installing Flash.

Session ID: 2023-09-23:559d82cbdbffb1124eb48581 Player ID: vjs_video_3

OK

Close Modal Dialog

Caption Settings Dialog

Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window.

TextColorWhiteWhiteWhiteBlackBlackRedRedGreenGreenBlueBlueYellowYellowMagentaMagentaCyanCyanTransparencyOpaqueOpaqueOpaqueSemi-TransparentSemi-TransparentBackgroundColorBlackBlackBlackWhiteWhiteRedRedGreenGreenBlueBlueYellowYellowMagentaMagentaCyanCyanTransparencyOpaqueOpaqueOpaqueSemi-TransparentSemi-TransparentTransparentTransparentWindowColorBlackBlackBlackWhiteWhiteRedRedGreenGreenBlueBlueYellowYellowMagentaMagentaCyanCyanTransparencyTransparentTransparentTransparentSemi-TransparentSemi-TransparentOpaqueOpaque

Font Size100%50%50%75%75%100%100%125%125%150%150%175%175%200%200%300%300%400%400%

Text Edge StyleNoneNoneNoneRaisedRaisedDepressedDepressedUniformUniformDropshadowDropshadow

Font FamilyProportional Sans-SerifProportional Sans-SerifProportional Sans-SerifMonospace Sans-SerifMonospace Sans-SerifProportional SerifProportional SerifMonospace SerifMonospace SerifCasualCasualScriptScriptSmall CapsSmall Caps

DefaultsDone

Close Modal Dialog

This is a modal window. This modal can be closed by pressing the Escape key or activating the close button.

WATCH: Canadian Pacific Holiday Train rolls through the area

But with “may” being neither “yes” or “no” on the lights’ status, fans in the Lenawee County hamlet of Sand Creek, Mich., still plan to head out to the railroad Friday night to watch the train go by, relying on spotters up the line toward Detroit to let them know if the lights are, in fact, lit.

“Nothing formal is being planned. ... I would assume there will be some folks hanging around but nothing concrete. I will probably go to the post office where we were last year to hang out,” said Ron Williams, who maintains a Facebook page, CP holiday train thru Lenawee.

But Read it and Reap, a community library, has canceled plans for a formal gathering related to the train’s passage, according to its Facebook page.

Canadian Pacific has since the 1980s used other railroads’ tracks to run its trains between Windsor and Chicago rather than follow a longer route it once entirely owned that ran through Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., across the Upper Peninsula, and south through Wisconsin.

When it began running its holiday trains — there actually are two of them — 19 years ago to solicit donations to food banks in communities it serves, CP sent one of them the same way it runs freight trains to get from Ontario to its Chicago-area lines.

That route has, since the mid-2000s, used Norfolk Southern tracks between Detroit and the south side of Chicago.

CP’s prepared statement, upon which Mr. Cummings declined to elaborate, suggested safety concerns as the reason the railroad might keep its train dark across the NS lines. The festive train has attracted throngs of spectators along those lines in past years, even without formal promotion by either company.

“Please help us have a safe journey by staying off railroad property, which includes the right-of-way, which can extend approximately 50 feet from either side of the track,” Mr. Cummings said. “Accessing railroad property is not only dangerous, but illegal. We appreciate your support of the Holiday Train and encourage you to donate to your local food shelf this holiday season if possible.”

Jonathan Glass, a Norfolk Southern spokesman, said his company had made no request to CP to extinguish its train’s lights while on NS rails.

“Based on available information, there have been no safety-related incidents involving the public — as in a pedestrian being struck by the train — during this train’s operation on NS tracks,” Mr. Glass said.

The CP train’s schedule calls for a stop in Windsor from 6 to 6:30 p.m. Friday, which is about the same time of its Windsor stops in past years. Afterward, the train in the past has taken several hours to cross the Canada-U.S. border into Detroit before setting out across the Michigan countryside.

The festive lights have normally been turned off during border inspection, so the uncertainty is whether they’ll be turned back on again upon departure from Detroit, as has been done in the past.

Those wishing to see the train earlier in the day will need to go to Canada. It’s scheduled to arrive in Windsor at 5:20 p.m. after making a stop in Chatham, Ont., earlier in the afternoon. During the train’s stops, musicians traveling on board perform a brief concert while the railroad collects donations for local food banks.

It was early March, and COVID-19 — still being called simply “the coronavirus” by most people — was a cloud on a far horizon. Yet Todd Hendricks Jr., second-generation owner of Pioneer Industrial Systems in Alvordton, Ohio, was already thinking of long-term effects in what would ultimately become a world-changing pandemic.

“It’s going to create a pent-up demand, as companies that are being cautious now about big-ticket items decide to purchase,” he says. “In the past, situations like this have created a spike in demand.”

Pioneer Industrial Systems might be particularly well placed to deal with the pandemic, since their design, construction and support of industrial automation is by definition about reducing dirt and danger from production lines.

Now a global leader in equipment specifically geared to the tire industry, the company was founded by Todd Hendricks Sr., who earned his mechanical engineering degree from The University of Toledo in 1988. As his son relates, “After graduation he worked for a custom machine builder in Williams County. Dad worked as manager, then in sales and quoting. He was company president in 1998 when the owners said they didn’t want to do engineering; rather, they wanted to build from other people’s designs.

“The concept engineering was what Dad loved to do, so he told them, ‘Well, I’ll start a company to do the engineering and you guys build.’ That’s what he did, working out of his house. He subcontracted with other engineers, getting bigger and bigger contracts, until customers began asking why they had to go to two places: one for engineering, one for building machines. Typically in the industry, you design it, you build it.”

That customer need pushed Hendricks Sr. to consider building equipment — and a subsequent contract for building four large-scale machines proved to be the springboard for becoming the company Pioneer Industrial Systems is today.

Specializing in serving the tire industry was another example of evolution through customer need. “We had done several machines for the tire industry by partnering with other companies, and found that we were really good at it. Customers liked our product, and liked what he could do for them,” Todd Jr. says.

“Tire manufacturing was an older industry, very manually based, very physical, dirty and dangerous, with a lot of injuries. We saw it as prime opportunity it for automation. So in 2012 we really focused in on it, looking for new opportunities to support our customers. In 2018 we added people to our sales team and grew.”

Grow they did, as the companies they served grew with the help of machines from Pioneer Industrial Systems. The perceived link between automation and layoffs didn’t prove to be the case, either, Hendricks says. “What we heard over and over [from company owners] was that it’s a manual process, it’s hard to find labor, it’s dangerous, people are getting hurt. We saw that if we could automate those positions, they could move those people elsewhere — which is what typically happens.

“We’ll either automate an old piece of machinery to reduce operator error or increase efficiency, or automate a manual process — and those people who were doing it are moved to another part of plant.”

Other industries have taken note, he says. “It’s transformative. Even small manufacturers have automated in the last couple years, something I would never have guessed earlier. Their concern is that it’s hard to hire people and even harder to hire them for physically taxing, dusty, dangerous jobs that take a toll on human beings. We’ve found that by automating those jobs, we can help small business owners get a quick return on their investment.”

Todd Jr., who’s been the company’s Chief Operations Officer since 2012, knows that economics is often the deciding factor in automation — and that it’s a win-win equation: “I can’t remember a time when you put a piece of machinery in and they walk people out the door. Typically, we help companies automate the dangerous stuff, then they put their people into more value-added positions. They’ve doubled the output for both machines and employees.

“Many good things happen when a company automates. It allows them to compete internationally as well, against places where the standard of living isn’t as high, but now they can compete with workers making $3 or $4 an hour.”

Another win-win for Pioneer has been its affiliation with the UT Family Business Center, where as well as a member he’s a vice chair on the advisory board: “They’ve really been a resource, connecting me with people in similar situations. I can’t count the times when I’ve been struggling with something and make a quick call to a center member or a friend I made through the center.”

He says that during the transition of taking the company reins, “handling the details of the day-to-day operations and let my dad focus on sales,” was challenging at first.

“This company was my Dad’s baby, he was always the one in control, making the decisions. It was different for both of us, and we had conflicts at first. But there was a great Family Business Center forum run by Lisa Stewart, who talked about succession planning. She brought the psychology side into it, not just the tactical nuts and bolts, and it was really impactful to me, and shaped a ton of conversations between [my father and me].

“After we approached it like that — that I don’t know everything, dad still cares about the company — the transition was pretty seamless.”

As Todd Jr. notes, father and son still carpool into work from Toledo every day, giving them time to talk. “But I’m forever grateful to the center for that network of people who can relate to what you’re going through, because small family business is hard, let’s face it.”

In the meantime, he’s looking ahead to when COVID-19 is a memory and a bump in the economic road. “We’re different in that we don’t produce a product, we produce a machine that allows other companies to produce their products.

As we go forward,” he says with confidence, “companies that do invest in automation will have advantage over companies that don’t.”

Back to Member Spotlight

THE MOORE FAMILY … Pastor Jay Moore stands with his wife Lindsay, 12-year-old daughter Adaleia, 6-year-old daughter Ellianna and 3-year-old daughter Aileena.

By: Jacob Kessler

The Olive Branch Church has received a new pastor. The Olive Branch is located on County Road P and US-127 in Williams County. It is in-between Alvordton and West Unity and only a couple miles away from Harrison Lake State Park.

The new pastor is Jay Moore who grew up in the Hilltop area where he went to school. In Highschool Jay was involved in part time ministry. After graduating he decided to move out west to Colorado Springs where he attended worship school in 2007 where he also met his wife, Lindsay.

He continued to serve in part time worship positions until early 2016 when he took an associate pastor’s position at the church in Montana. Later on in late 2019 Jay was working on creating a church in Portland Oregon.

When 2020 came, and brought COVID with it, plans changed for the church in Portland. Jay and his family started looking for where the Lord was leading them next. Olive Branch Church’s long-time pastor passed away in 2017.

Since then, the church has had a hit and miss experience with pastors and have been trying to fill that space for some time. In mid-April Jay and his family moved to Northwest Ohio to take the position in the interim. He was officially hired as the Senior Pastor on June 6th.

“I never thought I would move back to Northwest Ohio. I have seen incredible people and incredible places, but the Lord called me back. My grandparents actually attended Olive Branch, so it also allows me to be closer to family,” said Jay.

Jay and his wife have been married for 14 years and have traveled across the west. They have three daughters Adaleia, Ellianna and Aileena. “I couldn’t do any of this without my family’s support. They have been incredible,” said Jay.

The church itself started back in 1872 making it 149 years old and has around 25 visitors during every service. Jay explained that he wants to see this grow into what the Lord has planned.

“We don’t want to be just a people that gather here on Sunday mornings. It’s coming together and worshipping him and then applying it to our lives that is important. We want to be a people of disciples that make other disciples,” Jay explained.

On behalf of Olive Branch Church Jay would like to invite everyone to come and learn about and worship Jesus together.

Jacob can be reached at [email protected]

For more than a decade, a festive “holiday train” has plied a Norfolk Southern railroad line across parts of southeast Michigan and northwest Ohio several weeks before Christmas, attracting crowds of onlookers along the way.

But because the train belonged to another railroad — Canadian Pacific, now officially the Canadian Pacific Kansas City railroad as a result of a merger earlier this year with Kansas City Southern — it hasn’t made any official stops here or even run on a set schedule.

This year’s edition is slated to run Friday night.

Past years’ trips have typically left Detroit sometime after 8:30 p.m. But it’s often close to midnight, and sometimes later, before the train enters far northwest Ohio near the Fulton/Williams county line. It crosses into Indiana southwest of Blakeslee.

Canadian Pacific obtained rights to operate trains over specific Norfolk Southern lines in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan in 2005, and with that agreement came the annual holiday train trips from Detroit to Chicago — except during the coronavirus pandemic.

For the first few years after it started using that route, the train ran in the daytime, but it has run at night for the most part.

Canadian Pacific itself has balked at publicizing the Detroit-Chicago run because it uses the Norfolk Southern tracks.

In the past, railroad spokesmen have said the train might run with its festive lights turned off to discourage spectators — particularly ones who might get dangerously close to the tracks — but every year so far the lights have stayed on.

Overall, it has operated the brightly lit special trains across its network since 1999.

During the train’s official stops, live, professional musicians perform on a stage set up in one of the train’s box cars while spectators are canvassed for donations that Canadian Pacific Kansas City then provides to nearby food banks.

According to the railroad, the trains have raised more than $22.5 million and more than 5 million pounds of food for community food banks across North America.

They stop at scores of cities and towns across the network, including communities in the Northeast, Midwest, and now as far south as Shreveport, La., where Canadian Pacific Kansas City has lines in the United States.

As usual, the last performance stop for the train that runs from Detroit to Chicago is planned for 6 p.m. Friday in Windsor, Ont.

Seaforth, a country music duo from Australia consisting of Tom Jordan and Mitch Thompson, and Kiesza, a Canadian singer-songwriter who rose to fame with her breakthrough single “Hideaway” in 2014, are slated to play for half an hour.

After the Windsor show, the train typically offloads passengers not entering the United States and takes on the first of two American engine crews that guide its trip to Chicago. It then must clear U.S. Customs and Border Control to transit a tunnel under the Detroit River, and get authority from Norfolk Southern personnel in Detroit to enter that railroad’s tracks.

All of those complications, plus the potential for having to wait at one or more sidings for Norfolk Southern freight trains to pass, make the train’s downstream appearances in communities including Milan, Britton, Adrian, and North Morenci in Michigan and Alvordton, Montpelier, and Blakeslee in Ohio difficult to time.

But several Facebook pages and other online groups follow the train’s progress, with rail enthusiasts reporting the time and place where they see it. All typically have some form of “CP” or “CPKC” plus “Holiday Train” in their titles.