Medical device manufacturer B. Braun will break ground next year on a second production facility to be built alongside its current one in Hanover Township, Lehigh County.
Hanover Township supervisors on Wednesday night approved land development and conditional use plans for the expansion project, which calls for the construction of a two-story, 310,000-square-foot building on a 27-acre site next to B. Braun’s manufacturing plant on Marcon Boulevard in Lehigh Valley Industrial Park III.
The building, which will be built on the former site of the SureFit slipcover plant, will connect to the existing B. Braun building.
A separate, 10,295-square-foot maintenance building also will be built, along with a parking lot with 326 spaces.
The second production facility is expected to generate an additional 380 vehicle trips per day, including employees and trucks, said Laura Eberly of Pennoni Associates, an engineering consultant.
B. Braun anticipates breaking ground in the spring with a completion date during the third quarter of 2021, said Rex Boland, B. Braun’s vice president and general manager of Allentown operations.
He said the company has not determined how many jobs the expansion would create, but site plans filed with the township and previous interviews with local officials have pegged the number at about 250.
B. Braun, one of the Lehigh Valley’s largest manufacturers, has about 2,000 employees in the Valley spread across several locations: its Bethlehem headquarters, its manufacturing plant in Hanover Township and a distribution center on Boulder Drive in Breinigsville.
The development will boost B. Braun’s total area employment to just a shade behind Mack Trucks’ (2,400 workers) and Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem’s (2,500 employees). For the Lehigh Valley, it will add jobs to the area’s manufacturing core, identified as one of the region’s target sectors where the annual average wage is nearly $39,000 across all occupations, according to a talent supply study released last month by the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corp.
The distance from ground level to the rooftop of the new facility will be 50 feet, the maximum height allowed by the township’s ordinance, but B. Braun was approved for 53.5 feet to allow for a rooftop parapet to discharge steam and an access stairwell that will reach 62 feet.
Hanover’s ordinance allows for buildings to reach up to 65 feet by conditional use.
Tim Charlesworth, an attorney representing B. Braun, contended that conditional use approval wasn’t even necessary because neither the parapet nor stairwell is meant for human habitation, and the parapet, he said, is the equivalent of a chimney.
Supervisors voted 5-0 in favor of both the conditional use and land development plan.
B. Braun, with its global headquarters in Germany and a presence in 64 countries, has been growing.
B. Braun’s primary manufacturing facilities in the United States are in Irvine, Calif., Carrollton, Texas, and Hanover Township, the last of which includes the Introcan Safety IV catheter production line that is a three-shift operation running five days a week. In 2016, B. Braun committed to an intravenous solutions plant in Daytona Beach, Fla., an investment expected to top $100 million and employ 175 people.
That’s just one part of B. Braun’s expansion plans in North America.
At the Manufacturing Momentum in Bethlehem event last year, co-hosted by the LVEDC and the Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce, Boland said B. Braun planned to invest more than $1 billion in its operations in North America over the next four years. He said a “good portion” of that money would be spent in the Lehigh Valley, according to a summary of the event on LVEDC’s website.
The company’s sales hit almost $7.9 billion in the 2017 fiscal year, up 5 percent from the prior year.
B. Braun’s employment also has grown significantly: As of Dec. 31, the company employed 61,583 people across the globe, up from 49,889 five years earlier.
Morning Call reporter Jon Harris contributed to this story. Kevin Duffy is a freelance writer.
