Louisville City Manager Tom Ault says his town created a 290-acre industrial park two years ago with help from former-Governor  Ted Strickland’s administration.

“Never did we imagine that the entire site would go to one user like this,” Ault says.

Chesapeake names its field offices after geologic formations, not states or cities. This one will be the Utica Field office because that’s the shale formation Chesapeake and other drillers plan to tap most often for oil and gas in Ohio.

The company isn’t saying how many employees will work at the Louisville site but it is planning to construct several buildings.  Ault says the city will give the energy company a tax abatements based on the number of employees.

“The only tax incentive provided to the company is a credit against income tax withholding,” Ault says. “They will get 25 percent of the income taxes that they pay through withholding back over a period of 10 years beginning in 2016.”        

While most of the Chesapeake jobs are already in the region, Ault expects spinoff jobs to be created in his city of 92-hundred people.

“There is already three or four other oil and gas related business that have located in and around Louisville in the last year and I would be very surprised if there aren’t more after this announcement,” Ault says. “We know there is going to be a great amount of truck driving jobs available in this area as the result of this.”