Clinton losing ADP as company shifts up to 100 jobs to Georgia

Automatic Data Processing, a business-outsourcing provider more commonly known as ADP, is shutting down in Clinton and moving its approximately 100 jobs to Augusta, Ga.

New Jersey-based ADP has not responded to phone calls over the last couple of days but a spokesman for the Mississippi Development Authority confirmed the company’s departure from the South Pointe Business Park (the former WorldCom Center), where it moved into in early 2008 with the expectation of creating up to 1,000 jobs over a five-year period.

“The company is consolidating operations into its Augusta, Ga., location, with a target date of February. There are 90 to 100 jobs involved,” said Dan Turner, MDA spokesman.

He said the incentives offered to ADP were all performance-based, essentially centered on the number of jobs created. The MDA was researching the incentives Friday.

The global company’s Solutions Center in Clinton provides business-to-business support through handling of inbound calls, using ADP’s payroll and human resources-related applications and automotive dealer-related products and services, the company says.

ADP says it has annual revenues of nearly $8 billion and approximately 585,000 clients.

In announcing its decision to set up shop in Clinton more than five years ago, ADP said it expected to attract professionals across the state and the nation into its workforce.

“Companies like ADP recognize the unlimited workforce population of the area, which includes graduates from both two- and four-year academic institutions,” Ross Tucker, director of the Greater Jackson Alliance, said at a 2007 press conference announcing ADP’s arrival.

Breck Hines, executive VP of Duckworth Realty, which handles leasing for South Pointe Business Park, said ADA notified the firm this week that it would be giving up its 30,290 square feet of space – a full floor – in March. “At one point they had twice as much space,” Hines said.

Hines said ADP has flexibility in its lease to vacate the space without penalty.

Soon after its arrival in Clinton, ADP expanded into a second floor at South Pointe but downsized back to a single floor a couple of years ago, according to Hines.

South Pointe Business Park has 360,000 square feet of total space in its three inter-connected buildings. At the moment, it is 63 percent leased of which Verizon has about 75,000 square feet. Verizon, Lockheed, University Physicians and ADA – at least until March – are the major tenants.

As the former headquarters of Bernie Ebber’s WorldCom telecommunications giant, High Point Business Park has immense telecom and fiber-optic capacity. It’s not the sort of building that a company – even a well-heeled telecom – would be likely to build today, Hines said, noting the huge expensive that would be involved.

“It’s a class A facility that nobody would pay to recreate today,” he said, calling its telecommunications and fiber-optic capacities “unrivaled.

 

 

 

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