Tommy Gate Liftgate Manufacturing Facility, Woodbine, Iowa

Tommy Gate has made hydraulic liftgates in Woodbine, Iowa, since 1965, and the family that owns it isn’t leaving. Woodbine Manufacturing Co. and ARCO National Construction’s Omaha division broke ground in late October on a 345,200-square-foot build-to-suit manufacturing facility in town, a $58 million capital investment that will add production capacity, expand existing product lines and make room for new ones.

The Iowa Economic Development Authority board backed the project in September with $2.18 million in tax credits through its Business Incentives for Growth program. The award is tied to 20 new jobs, all at a qualifying wage of $27.75 an hour.

Project Scope

The building is mostly plant floor. It carries 40,250 square feet of office space and a 2,200-square-foot mezzanine, with the rest given over to production and support areas laid out around Tommy Gate’s own manufacturing flow. Renderings released with the groundbreaking are credited to GMA Architects.

ARCO is using tilt-up concrete walls with a 24-foot clear height, six dock positions and two drive-thru doors. There’s also an insulated metal panel wash bay, which makes sense for a company that paints and ships steel liftgates for trucks and trailers. Aggregate piers below the floor slab and shallow foundations carry the structure, a ground-improvement call that usually beats deep foundations on cost when the soils allow it.

The power and life-safety package is sized for heavy manufacturing. The plant gets 3,000-amp electrical service and lighting of 30 to 50 foot-candles across production areas. Fire protection is an ESFR sprinkler system fed by a 1,500 GPM electric fire pump and its own 150,000-gallon water storage tank. Up top, it’s a 45-mil TPO membrane over R-25 insulation.

Why It Matters

Rural manufacturers usually face a simple choice when they outgrow a plant: build at home, where the workforce is, or move closer to a metro and its utilities. Woodbine Manufacturing picked home. The on-site tank and fire pump hint at what that choice costs, because a town this size can’t always deliver the fire flow an ESFR system needs off the municipal main.

It’s also a sign of where truck equipment demand sits. Tommy Gate and its Anteo brand sell liftgates and cargo-handling gear to upfitters and fleets, and the company says the new plant will let it add products, not just volume. A $58 million plant backing 20 incented jobs looks thin on paper. It reads differently once you see it as capacity for a workforce that’s already in Woodbine, not a plant built to hire from scratch.

Project Team & Details