Monday, April 9, 2007 | 5:58 PM

On the Agenda: "Win-win-win?"

Filed under: business, jobs, trustees

Canton has posted tomorrow night’s Board of Trustees meeting agenda.

Probably the most pressing item, G-9, relates to a bid to retain the township’s third-largest employer, Miesel-Sysco Food Service.

You can read Supervisor Tom Yack’s full explanation on page 71 of the PDF file, but here’s the situation in a nutshell:

Sysco, a food distributor, wants to expand by 90,000 square feet its location near Haggerty/Van Born roads, but the company needs more land near its existing 332,000 square-foot building. One of Sysco’s neighbors is POCO Inc., a company that “supplies a variety of construction safety devices to the road building industry.”

It so happens that POCO wants to move off of the 8 acres it occupies west of Sysco.

After much talking behind the scenes, Yack is proposing the township sell POCO some land it owns on Sheldon Road south of Michigan Ave. parcel to POCO for $550,000.

From the background material:

The lynch pin in Sysco’s expansion is the acquisition of POCO’s property at or slightly higher than market rate. POCO’s owner and Canton have been working cooperatively to produce a win-win-win situation. POCO will sell 8 acres at an acceptable per acre amount to Sysco and we in turn will sell our parcel to POCO for $550,000.

The Canton parcel is 61 acres, but Yack said just 25 acres of that is usable due to natural features on the site.

“It’s a site that has lots of issues,” he told me Monday. “Probably, 40 percent of the land is wet at the south end.”

Wet, as in wetlands and creeks, as in not buildable.

The township’s role in this deal is rare, but Yack said it is necessary because Sysco is looking at sites in Ohio and Indiana.

“That’s the only reason we’re getting involved, pure and simple. It’s 700 jobs,” said Yack, who adds in the background material that the average annual salary there is $55,000.

Sysco was the township’s eighth-largest taxpayer in 2005, according to the comprehensive annual financial report for that year. It is also the third-largest employer, after the Plymouth-Canton Community Schools and Yazaki North America.

There’s no guarantee a vote to sell the property will keep Sysco here, though. Yack writes in the background material:

“The purchase of the Canton parcel by POCO would be tied to a Sysco/POCO closing. If, and only if, the POCO sale were consummated would we close on our parcel.”

If you can’t get to the meeting, come back for a full report in the Thursday edition of The Canton Eagle.

UPDATE (9:28 p.m. on April 10): The board of trustees approved the sale in a 5-0 vote tonight. (Clerk Terry Bennett and Trustee Todd Caccamo were absent.) Said Yack of the effort to retain Sysco: “Welcome to the new day in Michigan.”

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