First Posted: 2/24/2015
LIMA — The Ford Motor Co. Lima Engine Plant is projected to build more than 700,000 engines this year, trumping its numbers from the past 15 years.
The plant hasn’t built that many engines in one year since 2000, said plant manager Mike Felix at the Lima Auto Task Force meeting on Tuesday.
It’s “great news,” he said. “It’s growth for the plant, growth for the community and it certainly has our plate full.”
The plant has been hiring since around Thanksgiving, and is still going, with an estimated total of about 200 new production jobs being added, he said.
About 75 percent to 80 percent of the facility’s hiring has been completed for this year, though there are still “a number of open positions,” Felix said.
Jay Bell, UAW Local 1219 president, also attended the meeting and said the facility brought in 22 new employees this week, and around 30 in each of the past two weeks. And that will continue, Felix said, as the facility is not finished staffing its new line.
“It’s been a busy first six weeks of the year,” Felix said.
Felix plans to reveal more information on job openings on Wednesday morning at the mayor’s news conference, he said. Right now, the plant employs about 1,100 hourly employees and some 120 salaried employees.
Five to seven years ago, there were worries that the Lima plant would close and then it was 2/3 empty, Felix said.
Today, the recently launched line of the 2.7 liter EcoBoost engine fills up 800,000 square feet of floor space in the 2.5 million-square-foot plant, Felix said, and the number of employees at the plant has increased every year since Felix began there in May 2011.
Early sales indications for F-series trucks are also “phenomenal,” Felix said.
“There’s been a fair amount of pent up demand for the new truck,” he said. “A lot of F-series buyers were holding out waiting for the new truck to come in. … It’s kept our volumes pretty robust right now.”
Between the two engines the Lima plant produces, around 35 percent to 40 percent of the truck volume will be engines coming out of Lima, Felix said.
“We’ve got a very bright future going forward out at the plant,” he said.
