Texas Governor Greg Abbott was on hand to help RoyOMartin celebrate the grand opening and open house for its Corrigan oriented strand board (OSB) facility Wednesday.
Constructed near the company’s original OSB plant, the new expansion is located at 1923 U.S. Highway 287 West in Corrigan. The new facility is said to increase the mill’s size and production capacity to 1,400 MMSF (million square feet), which is an increase of around 43% annually. The addition now makes Corrigan OSB, L.L.C. North America’s largest OSB mill in terms of capacity.
The new facility also provides a total of 300 jobs at the mill, which was a focus of Abbott’s speech Wednesday.
“Very fundamentally, one thing we're here to talk about is creating more good paying jobs right here in the great state of Texas," the governor said.
Abbott said the state has been involved in more than 20 economic development projects in East Texas over the past few years. Those projects are in Crockett, Jacksonville, Longview, Nacogdoches, Lufkin and many more.
"One thing I know from having been an economic development for 10 years now, is projects like this don't just happen and they don't occur because of one person getting involved,” Abbott said. “Texas is number one in the United States for the most economic development projects every year that I have been governor. It has been driven by those at the local level, so thank you to all of those local level officials who have been involved in making this process come to fruition."
The prosperity achieved in Texas, he told the audience of a few hundred, is spread across the entire state with an intense focus that more jobs are created in East Texas.
"The OSB that comes out of the facility goes into the housing market. If you look at a report that came out yesterday, two of the top three housing markets for the next year are Dallas-Fort Worth and the Houston area. Other than that, just statewide, Texas is number one for the housing market. Last year alone, there were more than 600,000 people who moved to Texas from some other place. The bottom line is, we need to build housing. One reason why people are feeling the pains of inflation and higher costs of living and higher costs of housing is because of an inadequate supply of housing. What RoyOMartin is doing in this facility is trying to drive down the price of housing by facilitating building houses faster and better in the great state of Texas."
