Corridor companies get state financial help

Two Corridor companies and Microsoft Corp. were among eight businesses approved Friday for financial incentives by the Iowa Economic Development Authority Board.

ReConserve Inc., corporate parent of Cedar Rapids-based ReConserve of Iowa, was awarded tax benefits through the state's high quality jobs program for a $12 million modernization project. The company, which collects and processes bakery waste materials into animal feed ingredients, is planning a project that includes land acquisition and site improvements that will keep it in Iowa and enable it to operate more efficiently.

Iowa City-based Clipse Therapeutics was awarded a $25,000 proof of commercial relevance loan to conduct a marketing study to determine product competitiveness. Clipse Therapeutics is developing a disposable device to rapidly deliver drugs through inner cheek of a patient.

Drug delivery through the device is easy, fast and avoids injections. The first targeted market is the delivery of a generic anticonvulsant drug for the urgent treatment of epileptic seizures.

Microsoft was awarded tax benefits from the state's high quality jobs program for phase one of a four-phase regional data center and associated support infrastructure. The latter will house servers and computer equipment to operate large-scale web portal services as part of Microsoft's online services businesses.

The $417.7 million capital investment in West Des Moines is expected to create 57 jobs, of which 11 will pay a qualifying wage of $27.92 per hour.

Also receiving financial assistance in the form of a $1 million and tax benefits was Keokuk Mills, a recently formed company to reopen Keokuk Steel Manufacturing, which was closed in March 2016 by its parent company.

The new organization proposes to restart operations of the steel casting foundry that produces castings for manufacturers in the agricultural, construction and utility industries. The project has a capital investment of $4.5 million and is expected to create 200 jobs at a qualifying wage of $14.39 per hour.