Ohio Edison Buys Former Weatherford Building for $9.16M
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Ohio Edison Co. will relocate its Youngstown Service Center, now on South Avenue, to the Performance Place building once occupied by an oilfield services company that shuttered its local operation just a few years after coming to the city.
Ohio Edison, a subsidiary of Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp., purchased 1100 Performance Place for $9.16 million, Mahoning County records show.
The company plans to move the entire service center, now at 730 South Ave., to the Performance Place site by the end of 2024, FirstEnergy spokeswoman Lauren Siburkis said.
The current service center building was constructed in 1936 and “has served us well for many years but is ready for an upgrade,” she said.
“The decision to buy the new property was based on the logistical and financial challenges of demolishing the current building and constructing a new one,” she continued. “The 1100 Performance Place property will be retrofit interiorly and exteriorly to meet FirstEnergy’s standards. Plans are being developed, and construction is expected to start this year.”
Texas-based Weatherford LP came to the Mahoning Valley in 2012 as part of an anticipated boom in oil and gas production in the northern tier of eastern Ohio’s Utica/Point Pleasant shale formation. Weatherford, which downsized its operations in Youngstown about five years ago, sold the Performance Place property to Texas Industrial LLC for $3.1 million.
At 153,708 square feet, according to online real estate listing site LoopNet, the Performance Place building is similar in size to the existing service center and about a mile away.
The center serves as the reporting location for Ohio Edison’s Youngstown-area line workers, operations personnel, engineers, job designers, meter readers, meter services employees and other support personnel.
“The plan is to move all employees at the existing location to Performance Place,” Siburkis said. Transmission personnel will work out of the new transmission service center in North Jackson.
Ohio Edison is exploring its options and “working through the details of what to do with the existing property,” she said.
Copyright 2024 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
