Ford Motor Co. began producing three new models at its Hermosillo, Sonora, plant this week – a move that means contracts for some Southern Arizona firms and extra train traffic for Nogales.
Ford is investing $1.2 billion in an expansion of its existing stamping and assembly plant about a four-hour drive south of Tucson to make the Ford Fusion, Lincoln Zephyr and Mercury Milan.
Suppliers are putting another $800 million into a massive industrial park across the street, the Sonoran newspaper El Imparcial reported, for a total investment of around $2 billion.
Those numbers already have turned into money for some Southern Arizona companies, said Lee Smith, director of business development for Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities Inc.
“There have been contracts made, and we have several opportunities in the works for our region,” said Smith, who runs a supply-chain program called AzBusinessLinc.com
He declined to name the companies that have benefited from the Ford plant but said they are supporting Ford’s first-tier suppliers.
The plant itself will have about 6,800 employees and capacity to produce about 300,000 cars a year, Mexico’s minister of economy, Fernando Canales Clariond, said in Hermosillo Wednesday. More than 20,000 additional jobs are expected to result from the plant’s expansion – jobs at suppliers’ plants and in other businesses, he said.
Production during the next couple of months will be preliminary as the plant ramps up toward full production in October or November, Smith said. He has been traveling to Hermosillo twice a month to maintain relations with suppliers and seek opportunities for local businesses, he said.
Those opportunities may arise especially in this stage, as production problems arise, Smith said.
“We want to be there when they find problems, because we want to find solutions for them,” Smith said.
When the plant reaches full production, it could mean a doubling or tripling of train traffic through Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Ariz., El Imparcial reported. Already, residents of the twin border towns are bothered by trains that often block traffic as they cross the border in the middle of the cities.
Ford official Flavio Díaz Mirón told El Imparcial that “there will be an unending, uninterrupted railroad flow.”

A group of former U.S. Navy SEALs is training in Tucson to take a local firm’s technology to Iraq to help troops avoid the dangers of roadside bombs.
The former SEALs are training to use a device, made by Ionatron Inc., to find and detonate the bombs before U.S. troops encounter them. They will be sent to Iraq “very, very soon,” said Ionatron CEO Thomas Dearmin.
The devices are called JINs, or Joint Improvised Explosive Device Neutralizers. They can detect and disable or detonate roadside bombs, one of the deadliest threats facing American troops in Iraq, Ionatron executives say.
The JINs are developed at Ionatron’s Tucson office, 3590 E. Columbia St., and manufactured in the company’s factory in Mississippi.
Ionatron has produced 12 units for testing, some armored and some “basically disposable,” said Joseph Hayden, the company’s executive vice president for business operations.
Dearmin said in a conference call Wednesday that the company plans to produce 17 per month by November and could produce three times that amount by the end of December.
His comments came as the company released its second-quarter earnings report. Ionatron reported a net loss of $1.7 million, compared with a loss of $1.4 million in the second quarter of last year. This loss translates to a drop of 2 cents per share in the company stock, traded on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
Ionatron posted an overall increase in revenues for the second quarter, with $4 million in revenue, up from $1.8 million at the same time last year.
The stock closed at $7.54 per share Wednesday, down 9 cents from Tuesday’s close.
Also in the earnings statement, Ionatron reported that the budget passed by Congress in April included language that suggests at least $100 million will be set aside for JIN production.
“We think that in that bill there’s some money set aside” for Ionatron, Hayden said. But “until we actually have a contract, we can’t state for certain.”
The company will not name the government agency ordering the units, citing security issues.
Dearmin said the JIN is gaining attention as overseas dangers are publicized.
“Due to recent events and more casualties, we’ve received many, many phone calls from senior officials wanting to know when deployment is possible,” Dearmin said.
“The special forces that we’ve been training are comfortable with it,” Dearmin said. “They’ve operated it up to a mile away remotely.”
The company said previously that it planned to deliver those units to military troops in Iraq by the end of July.

Twelve-year-old Molly Spitler of Tucson didn’t have a technology career in mind when she signed up for IBM Corp.’s EXITE summer technology camp for girls.
But building a Web page, programming a robot and holding a human brain during the weeklong camp opened up a whole new world of possibilities for the Flowing Wells Junior High seventh-grader.
“Before, I wanted to be a lawyer, but since we did the marine biology, I want to do that,” said Molly, referring to one EXITE camp session at a University of Arizona science lab where campers dissected squid.
She was among 30 Flowing Wells Junior High students who participated this week in IBM’s EXITE – Exploring Interests in Technology and Engineering – camp for girls.
Fellow EXITE camper and Flowing Wells student Hannah Waddell already was pretty good with a computer, but the challenge of programming a Lego robot to follow a trail and avoid obstacles was something new.
“I had never done anything like that before,” said Hannah, 13, who is keeping her career options open but is leaning toward becoming a teacher.
“A lot of girls don’t recognize how cool math and science can be,” she said. “It’s just a great experience, and I’m really glad I got involved in it.”
That’s just the kind of reaction organizers of IBM’s EXITE camps are looking for.
Launched nationally in 1999 and locally in 2001, the program is aimed at boosting the number of women in engineering and technology careers.
About 1,200 students participated in EXITE camps at 40 IBM sites worldwide. Each site comes up with its own curriculum for the program.
Industry figures show the proportion of women in the computing sector dropped from 44 percent in 1996 to 32 percent in 2004.
“There’s not enough women in programming or engineering roles in companies, and in fact, it’s declining,” said Cindy Bogle, Tucson site manager for IBM’s Tivoli software and an EXITE camp mentor.
Bogle said it helps to create a space for teen girls to check out technology without the glare of peer pressure.
“This middle-school, junior-high age is where girls start to worry about what boys think, so this environment takes them away from all that, and they make tremendous progress,” she said.
The students broke into six-person teams to build a Web site around themes such as “Be the Best You Can Be,” with each student responsible for designing a single page.
On Friday, the girls put the finishing touches on colorful sites with animated graphics, links and photos.
“Some programs teach them how to build a page, but we wanted to give them the concept of how to build a whole site so it has continuity,” Bogle said.
The mentoring of Bogle and several other female IBM technologists also gets the girls’ attention.
“There’s not very many women in technology and science, so it’s cool they chose it,” EXITE camper Samantha Beal said.
Kim Babeu, Flowing Wells Junior High physical education teacher, said, “Working one on one with these IBM engineers, they have a one-to-one connection with these women, and it gives these girls something to look forward to and someone to look up to.”
“The growth in these girls from Monday to Friday is unbelievable, not only in their technical skills but in their belief in themselves that science and technology are fun and that they can do it,” said Babeu.
Among the biggest role models the EXITE campers met was Terri Mitchell, an 18-year IBM veteran who became head of Big Blue’s storage systems development center in Tucson in April.
Mitchell, whose father was an IBM engineer in New York, said she finds that girls are more interested in the real-world applications of technology than the technology itself.
With the EXITE camp, “they’re able to have enough hands-on (experience) that they really understand what the technology is, rather than just what it does,” she said.
Female role models are needed to reinforce the message that technology careers aren’t just for men, Mitchell added.
“Girls today are more tech-savvy than I ever was. However, they still can’t see themselves in technology jobs,” she said.

Check the Web   ● For more information on Small Business Innovation Research grants and related programs:   U.S. Department of Defense Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization: www.acq.osd.mil/sadbu   SBIR solicitations: www.sbirworld.com   Arizona Department of Commerce: www.commerce.state.az.us/ innovation/

America needs small, high-tech businesses to maintain technological dominance on the battlefield, a senior Defense Department official said Wednesday in Tucson.
To keep the flow of innovation going, the department and defense contractors such as Tucson-based Raytheon Missile Systems are reaching out to small businesses through the Defense Department’s Small Business Innovation Research – or SBIR – grants and other programs.
“Raytheon and other large companies can take care of themselves; it’s the smaller companies we are trying to help,” Victor Ciardello Jr., Defense Department director of small-business technology and industrial base, said at a high-tech industry luncheon sponsored by Raytheon Missile Systems at the Radisson City Center.
SBIR grants fund the early research and development of technology, sought by the Defense Department and other federal agencies in public solicitations. Grants range up to $100,000 in Phase I and up to $750,000 in Phase II of research. Grants from the similar Small Business Technology Transfer – or STTR – program involve universities and research institutions with small businesses.
Ciardello has been crisscrossing the country recently trying to raise awareness of SBIR, STTR and other small-business development programs.
Ciardello noted that the Defense Department is the largest issuer of SBIR grants, awarding some $1.1 billion of about $2 billion allocated through the program in fiscal 2004.
To boost small businesses, he said, Defense is trying to get small tech firms more involved in major manufacturing work.
“We’re talking aircraft, missiles, ships, land systems, rather than just services and construction and other low-hanging fruit,” he said.
A recent study of the major technology areas in the Defense Department’s current science and technology plan showed that small businesses were the source of about 35 percent of underlying technologies, Ciardello said.
Defense also is focusing on pushing SBIR Phase III – which offers no grant funding but instead fosters private and public investment in technology that is brought to market.
One recent Phase III success story, he said, is the rapid deployment of the “Phraselator,” a handheld device developed by a small Maryland company that translates common phrases into local languages in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Though overall SBIR funding is expected to remain steady, Ciardello said he expects the maximum amount for Phase I grants to be raised to $125,000 and maximum Phase II grants to be raised to $1 million next fiscal year.
Ciardello lauded Raytheon for its involvement with small business, including its mentorship of small firms.
Raytheon began beefing up its small-business development effort about a year and a half ago, said John Waszczak, director of advanced technology and of SBIR and STTR for Raytheon Missile Systems.
Waszczak noted that more than half of Raytheon Missile Systems’ supply base is made up of small businesses.
Local SBIR grant winners that Raytheon works with include Advanced Ceramics Research Inc., which has been developing low-cost, long-flight unmanned aerial vehicles for the military, Waszczak said.
In addition to SBIR and STTR programs, the Defense Department offers a “Mentor-Protégé” program that matches large companies with small firms, along with programs to help small businesses owned by women, minorities and veterans.