700 Sallie Mae jobs headed to Muncie could have gone to Anderson

About 700 new jobs slipped through Anderson’s fingers Monday.

Sallie Mae, a Fortune 500 company that provides student loans, will open a new debt management operation in Muncie and begin hiring high school graduates as soon as August.

Before the company chose Muncie, Anderson’s economic development team spent about nine months courting it, offering the former General Motors Plant 18 on Scatterfield Road.

What does Muncie have that Anderson doesn’t?

“We need to build more buildings,” Mayor Kevin Smith said. “We really have very few empty buildings.”

When Sallie Mae made its big announcement, Smith seized it as an example of a point he’d brought up in his State of the City address: Anderson needs more high-quality empty buildings to attract new business.

Also Monday, he stepped up his campaign to raise private investment for those new buildings with a presentation for a gathering of Anderson business people.

While some may argue that Anderson has more than enough empty buildings, Smith said they aren’t the kind businesses are looking for.

Anderson, he said, needs more “flexible use business space,” meaning empty buildings with floors, ceilings, water and sewer.

To get more of these built in Anderson, Smith gathered a group of real estate agents and business people together Monday to tout the benefits of building in Anderson.

The 54,000-square-foot space Sallie Mae will move into in Muncie was built in 1999, according to a company news release. After a 10-year lease, the company will buy the building.

It’s a shell structure, specifically designed to be a blank canvas that a company could make into a warehouse, a call center, or an office space, with relatively little money up front.

By contrast, Plant 18 doesn’t have heating, cooling, or even floors and walls.

“We didn’t have the facilities,” Greg Winkler, the city’s marketing consultant, said. “You hate to lose a deal, but if we’re not getting it, at least Muncie is.”

The Muncie facility will likely focus on student loan default prevention performed primarily by subsidiaries in Sallie Mae’s debt management division.

“Today’s job announcement is the largest in 20 years and means our high school and college graduates can choose a career with a Fortune 500 company right here in Muncie,” Muncie Mayor Dan Canan said in a news release.

The new jobs will bring the company’s total Indiana employment to more than 3,000.

According to the release, jobs will require “a high school education, communication and analytical skills, high energy and a goal-oriented mind set.”