Home » Lash to add second building, parking deck as it grows toward 1,700 jobs in Fort Mill

Lash to add second building, parking deck as it grows toward 1,700 jobs in Fort Mill

The company relocated to its new, 250,000-square-foot headquarters in March 2016, moving from Charlotte.

All told, Lash has said it plans to have 1,700 on the Kingsley Fort Mill campus, with the expected total investment there reaching $90 million.

 

Mayor Savage says the Kingsley development, including the 1,650 jobs to be brought there by LPL, have brought an economic recovery to Fort Mill, reversing the loss of textile jobs in the county and region.

“To bring those jobs to Fort Mill is a recovery that I welcome,” Savage says. Now many Fort Mill residents can stay within the county instead of commuting to jobs in Charlotte and elsewhere, she says.

Before Kingsley opened, Fort Mill and northern York County had increasingly become a bedroom community for Charlotte, Savage says.

“Life balance in Fort Mill changed” with the closing of Springs Industries Inc. plants in York and surrounding counties, she says. “We became predominantly rooftops.”

Still the “sense of community” remained in Fort Mill. Now that jobs are back, local residents can rebalance their lives without having to commute an hour-plus to jobs.

Lash, a part of AmerisourceBergen Corp. (NYSE:ABC), announced in 2014 that it will jump the Carolinas line to bring a $57.3 million investment to Fort Mill. The company said then that a second building would follow the first structure.

Lash Group works on behalf of health-care providers and pharmaceutical companies to help patients navigate the health-care system.

Officials at AmerisourceBergen on Monday couldn’t immediately answer questions about how many jobs the new structure would hold or the cost of that building.

The building will be constructed next to the current surface parking lots for Lash and within a short walk to the larger, main building on the campus.

Fort Mill officials expect the second Lash building will open sometime in 2018.

Two weeks ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released statistics that York County, during the third quarter of 2016, grew faster than any of the nation’s largest counties. Employment rose 6% during the quarter compared with national job growth of 1.7%.

Rob Youngblood, president of the York County Chamber of Commerce, says it’s all about quality of life.

“One of our primary efforts right now is trying to get the people with jobs in Charlotte, to save them the drive time and hassle to get to work, to come down here,” he told The Herald newspaper in Rock Hill.

Jobs coming in from Charlotte contributed to a 15% increase in the number of York County jobs during that quarter in the areas of professional and business services, York County officials say.

Ken Elkins