Nucor will build a $240 million steel rebar mill on a 400-acre site in Frostproof Florida..

The 25 percent tariff on imported steel announced last week by
President Donald Trump helped seal the deal on the Frostproof plant

FROSTPROOF – With the announcement of a nearly quarter-billion-dollar steel mill outside Frostproof, Polk County economic-development officials are celebrating one of the county’s biggest recruitment successes.

Nucor Corp. of Charlotte, North Carolina, officially said it will build a $240 million steel mill on a 400-acre site on U.S. 27 just south of Frostproof, about 65 miles east of Bradenton. The company said it expects to create 250 jobs paying an average annual salary of $66,000, plus benefits.

The new plant is one of the biggest new industrial companies ever recruited to Polk County.

“There hasn’t been a project of this size in many years,” said Sean Malott, executive director of the Central Florida Development Council, which helped recruit the company. “This is the biggest manufacturing property Polk County has had the chance to compete on.”

The next-largest project was the Coca-Cola Co. Main Street bottling plant, which opened in 2003 on a 64-acre site in Auburndale, Malott said. The $113 million, 620,000-square-foot plant initially created 100 new jobs and more than 100 additional jobs with later expansions. Beyond the Coca-Cola plant, Polk may not have seen an industrial facility of this size since the 1975 opening of the New Wales phosphate fertilizer plant, now operated by the Mosaic Co., south of Mulberry.

The Nucor “micro mill” will make steel rebar from scrap metal, according to the company, which expects construction to take two years after obtaining required regulatory approvals.

Malott said he had worked to recruit Nucor since June but the breakthrough didn’t happen until last month, when the Polk County Commission approved property-tax and impact-fee breaks worth about $1.5 million.

The 25 percent tariff on imported steel announced last week by President Donald Trump might have helped seal the deal on the Frostproof plant, Malott said. Although he couldn’t say how much of a factor it played in Nucor’s decision, “I think it helped, and it’s one of the reasons the company is looking at expansion opportunities,” he said. “This would be a good thing for U.S. steel.”

Nucor officials were looking for a site of more than 300 acres with railroad access near a major electricity substation that could provide enough power to operate the facility, Malott said. The Frostproof site fit the bill.

Frostproof Vice Mayor Martin Sullivan said he was excited about economic impact to the area. But he was more cautious about how much the city would benefit directly from the Nucor plant because of its location just outside the city limits.

“It will be great; it will be a boon to the local economy,” Sullivan said. “It will be much-needed, given the loss of jobs in the citrus industry.”

Frostproof would benefit more if it annexed the Nucor site into the city, which would add hundreds of thousands of dollars in new property-tax revenue to city coffers, he said.

The city could also benefit by...Read More HERE