BLS & Co. advised New York Life on the relocation of approximately 1,000 employees from the company’s Manhattan headquarters location to a new facility in Westchester, New York.

BLS & Co. was successful in securing an economic development incentive package that included a PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes), sales tax exemptions on construction materials and FF&E purchases, a state capital grant and a discount of the utility bills.

BLS & Co. provided incentives advisory services for SKF USA Inc.’s new Global Technical Center – Americas (GTCA), an engineering research and development center supporting SKF’s North and South American manufacturing operations. Naperville, IL -- a suburb of Chicago – was chosen for the 130,000 square foot build-to-suit facility.

BLS & Co. secured an incentives package for AeroFarms for its headquarters and R&D operation on a three-acre site in Newark, NJ, developed by the RBH Group.  AeroFarms is the largest indoor aeroponic farm in the world, growing up to two million pounds per year of leafy greens in a safe, sanitary and environmentally controlled facility.

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BLS & Co. worked with the Philadelphia Inquirer to secure an incentives package for the retention of its headquarters in Center City.

BLS & Co. was successful in restructuring the RCAP incentives program as well as securing low interest rate financing through Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation.

Prudential employs more than 4,800 people in the City of Newark where the Company occupies more than 1.8 million square feet of space. With several of its leases in the City set to expire the Company commenced a comprehensive evaluation of its Newark occupancy to identify the optimal location strategy.

BLS & Co. advised Prudential on the role of incentives in its overall location strategy, and ultimately secured approval of an Urban Transit Hub Tax Credit award in support of the construction of a proposed new facility and the creation of new high-compensation positions.  The project, which will result in a redevelopment of an entire city block, represents the single largest project in Newark in a generation.  

BLS & Co. was engaged by AbleTo Inc, a behavioral healthcare provider, to provide an incentives strategy for its planned new facility. The company was rapidly expanding, seeking to create new jobs in its technology and software development division with wages over $100,000 annually.

As part of the incentives package, AbleTo Inc., was approved for Excelsior Jobs Tax Credit incentive program for steadily creating new jobs in the state of New York.

BLS & Co. developed and executed an incentives strategy to induce the company to consolidate Royal Bank of Scotland's North American corporate bank, based in NYC, and its RBS/Greenwich Capital headquarters in a new office and trading floor in Stamford, CT. The package consists of transferable corporate income tax credits and other incentives in connection with the proposed retention and creation of approximately 1,800 jobs. The scale of this package required legislative hearings and consent.

BLS & Co. was engaged to devise an incentives strategy for ACE Limited (now Chubb) in support of their consolidation and relocation of back office operations from New York City to Jersey City, New Jersey.

As part of the package, ACE was approved for a New Jersey BEIP grant and an exemption from sales tax on construction materials and equipment purchases.

BLS & Co. worked with Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) on two projects: a New Jersey-based incentives advisory and a Florida-based site selection.

BLS & Co. developed and executed the incentives strategy to facilitate the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation’s (DTCC) move from Lower Manhattan to Jersey City, New Jersey. DTCC’s migration and ongoing operations in New Jersey were financed, in part, by the EDA’s Business Employment Incentive Program (BEIP).  DTCC also became the first beneficiary of the Economic Redevelopment and Growth (ERG) Grant program.

In 2002, the “Fed White Paper” challenged the financial industry to make the investments required to assure continuity and liquidity in capital markets. For the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), this challenge gave rise to an intensive confidential site search that scrutinized multiple markets over six months. The search ultimately concluded in Tampa, where the collaboration of state, county and city commitments made a material difference in off-setting project costs.

The approved incentives included the Governor’s Closing Fund and new city and county programs created for this project. BLS & Co. also advised the client on integration and restructuring of its pre-existing incentives agreement in NYC into its overall redeployment and diversification of operations to Florida.

Goya Foods is the premier provider of authentic Latino and Caribbean cuisine. BLS & Co. advised the company as it sought to address capacity constraints at its New Jersey headquarters and distribution facility.

BLS & Co. secured an award under the Urban Transit Hub Tax Credit program to support the project, which will include the creation of over 100 new jobs and the retention of over 300 existing jobs.

BLS & Co. was engaged by Mead Johnson Nutritionals, following its spinoff by Bristol-Myer Squibb, to advise the company on the choice of destination for its new executive offices.

BLS & Co. managed a multi-market comparative analysis in North America that ultimately resulted in the relocation of the company's leadership tier to a new Class A office space in Glenview, IL (suburban Chicago).

The firm also secured an EDGE grant from the State of Illinois to reduce the costs and help manage the risks associated with the redeployment.

BLS & Co. represented Diageo during their new headquarters location decision-making process. Their 270,000 square foot building in Norwalk, CT represented the very first project approved under the State's new Urban Reinvestment Act program and resulted in a reward of transferable tax credits, as well as sales tax exemptions and property tax abatements.

BLS & Co served as site selection and incentives consultant for Omnicom Group Inc. in support of the company’s competitive location decision-making process for targeted functions to be relocated out of New York City.

BLS & Co. advised Omnicom on evaluation of alternative relocation strategies to maximize savings and minimize operational disruption by redeploying selected operations to be co-located with related functions in cities where the company has successful operating experience and excess real estate capacity. Ultimately, the incentives package from the State of New Jersey was sufficient to induce the company to relocate nearly 500 jobs to Jersey City.  Omnicom considered locations in Connecticut, Texas, Ohio and Costa Rica before selecting New Jersey.

TradePoint Atlantic (TPA) – previously Sparrows Point Terminal – is a former 3,200 acre Bethlehem Steel plant site located in southeastern Baltimore County, Maryland.  TPA purchased the brownfield site in the fall of 2014 with plans to redevelop it into a major East Coast multi-modal distribution and manufacturing hub.

BLS & Co. was engaged to develop a comprehensive strategy to secure the public financing sources needed to mitigate the significant cost of repositioning a brownfields site of this scale and complexity.  Our services included:

• Benchmark analysis of the location’s incentives competitiveness versus similar competitive locations in seven other states;
• Management of a multi-firm team responsible for identifying and prioritizing available federal, state and local grant, incentives and financing programs to allow the developer to pursue environmental remediation and infrastructure improvements beyond what would otherwise be possible given market-based ROI targets;
• Development and execution of an overall strategy to design new incentives tools to improve the competitiveness of the site for potential tenants; and
• Development of a strategy for pursuit of public site development/remediation financing.

The competitive benchmarking analysis revealed an opportunity to improve the cost competitiveness of the site via the introduction of a targeted sales and use tax exemption for specified construction materials and warehousing equipment.  BLS & Co. served as “subject matter expert” to assist TPA in pursuit of the required legislation by documenting the competitive market-based rationale for the proposed exemption, providing data on similar programs in other locations, drafting proposed legislation and providing expert testimony during Senate and House hearings on the proposed legislation.  On May 19, 2016, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan signed the enabling legislation.

BLS & Co. and its energy services affiliate, Sugarloaf Associates, identified nine "Data Center Qualified Sites" for American Electric Power (NYSE: AEP), one of the nation's largest utilities.  After a comprehensive review of locations across AEP's 11-state territory, BLS & Co. qualified sites with reliable and redundant power supply, strong fiber networks, low disaster risks and a business-friendly climate. 

The team designed a three-phase evaluation process that analyzed the electric supply and capacity, access to long and short-haul fiber providers, water availability, electric costs, tax exemptions and incentives, demographics, vendor/supplier networks and the ability to complete construction within 18 months.  

As an extra step, a third-party engineering company modeled each site's ability to accommodate a 100,000-square-foot raised-floor data center designed to current industry standards.

BLS/Sugarloaf also completed an analysis of sites in 2 states for AEP data center / operations facility.  The team review the infrastructure, both manmade and natural disaster risks and the proximity of service providers to support a data center.