Chairman Oakley Clark Dietrich and Zephyrhills Water visits

2:57:11All right. Um I visited a uh manufacturer here locally in Dade City. It was uh Clark Dietrich uh out at the Business Center. I met with uh Tom Lehman, the plant manager, and they build uh steel studs instead of you're buying wood at nine foot and need them cut to eight and a half feet to put in the walls. They make them eight and a half feet. So they're basically their prices

2:57:41have gone up some, but but still very uh affordable, I think. And they're one of their biggest customers in the area is um uh Disney World over in Orlando and then a lot of um multifamily housing and all these those too. But there was one machine that was pretty interesting. They ought not only build those steel studs for walls, they also build a a lath material. And that material is Thin

2:58:11sheet of metal about eight or ten inches wide, and runs through the machine and it spreads out about this far, about two and a half feet or so, and it becomes a lath. You see the lath they put stucco on the walls and all, but they make that material right. And that's happening right here in Dade City. They have roughly 60 employees in that company. Uh they've had a little issues with. With uh getting some employees, but they I think they have 55 right now, so they're not far off from

2:58:42what employees they require. So but uh doing pretty good. This is also a Japanese owned uh manufacturing that's here in Dade City in the business center. And then I went down, I guess everybody had heard the rumors that uh Uh Nestle Water had sold out, and so I went down and made a visit with uh His name is Thebe Darwish as a plant manager at what we

2:59:12consider the Zephyrhills Water. So I went down and had a uh view uh uh

2:59:21Ms. Samoa and myself from she's from uh P D C had a good visit and toured some of that uh facilities they had. I'd never actually been back in there where they did the bottling and all. And they give numbers uh In equivalence of case numbers. Other words, they don't say we do a uh gallon bottles and so many. They do cases. Everything's counted by cases. And actually, uh they're gonna put in a new

2:59:51line. They wanna be a part of the community, they wanna be part of the Chamber and Zephyrhills, and they won't uh to do whatever they need to do to be a part of the family here in Pasco County. Very good employer. They have uh two hundred and seventy-five employees at this time and they uh plan on putting a new line in. Right now they do about 70 million cases a year. And with the new line they're expected to put in, they'll move that to 90 million cases

3:00:21a year.

3:00:24H he told me that he did um

3:00:28I think it's like ninety cases an hour. with this machine this machinery. But I mean it just it's amazing at the numbers. So but very good people and they when they put that new line in it's gonna be about six months out till they finish. And I've asked 'em if they'd be l happy if we would put on a uh ribbon cutting we'll do that with P E D C because they'll have twenty five employees when they do that. But um a company that's sold

3:00:59and gonna be here get bigger and make it more money. So they also had a a property next to 'em that they think they're might be interested in that to expand their warehouse. So

3:01:10um so we've so Amskills has been out there to meet with them because um They actually have a shortage of workers and can't run all their lines. So we're looking to um bring our mobile uh workshop out to the Zephyrhills area and help them um get those.

3:01:28Uh Amskills helping them with some training of employees and

3:01:32we actually uh may um have a site out there where we can set up a shop out in the Zephyrhills area.

3:01:38That'd be good.

3:01:38Yeah.