Day & Zimmerman will be the first major occupant of the newly formed Great Plains Industrial Park located between Parsons and Oswego.
Members of the Kansas Army Ammunition Plant’s Local Redevelopment Planning Authority met last Thursday to sign an agreement with D&Z, assigning it space in the industrial park and assuring the company’s presence for many years in the future.
Day & Zimmerman began operated at the Labette County site in 1970 as a manufacturer of conventional munitions, detonators, anti-armor cluster munitions and ACM bombs. D&Z is a major manufacturer of sensor-fused weapons for the U.S. military for many years.
Official closing of the KAAP started in 2005 when the Base Realignment and Closure Commission recommended the base’s phasing out. A focal point of the transition team, over the past three years, has been keeping Day & Zimmerman in Parsons where it will continue to be a contract manufacturer of munitions. The base will no longer be an asset of the U.S. Army, but will be under the auspices of the Local Redevelopment Planning Authority.
LRPA Executive Director Dan Goddard Thursday’s meeting was a giant step to insure that D&Z will continue to hold a major presence in the Great Plains Industrial Park.
Overall, the park comprises 13,727 acres which lay south and east of Parsons, or north and west of Oswego.
D&Z will occupy approximately 4,000 acres in the park and the remainder will be available for industrial or other development.
There will be parcels as large as 3,000 acres and a large number of operations and storage buildings available for development.  There is a 7,000 square foot office building outside the security perimeter and the facility has its own water and sewage treatment systems, with over 100 miles of roadway and 33 miles of improved rail lines.
Goddard said Day and Zimmerman will complete its production operation contracts with the U.S. Army which will expire on Dec. 31 of this year. Future operations of D&Z will be handled strictly as a munitions contractor, not a manager of Army assets.
Labette County Commissioners were on hand for the signing and they have passed a charter resolution outlining the powers of the LRPA and the LRA which eventually will become the sole community-involved entity.
Goddard said the LRA then will become the single point for the environmental cleanup, economic development, land use and other services once the plant is transferred to the community.
A consultant group, Matrix Design, was brought on board to help in every detail of the infrastructure and create a business plan that would lead the future development of the plant. A master plan will be presented by Mattrix on Aug. 5, according to Goddard.
“It takes a while to get these things done, but we’re getting there,” Goddard said.
Great Plains Industrial Park has a new website (greatplainsindustrialpark.com). Goddard said the website’s purpose will be to provide industry a location for obtaining information to help them make decisions about a potential relocation to southeast Kansas and to keep the citizens of the region informed about the progress of the transfer.