This story is excerpted from the MT Lowdown, a weekly newsletter digest containing original reporting and analysis published every Friday.
Community leaders in Lewistown are working to address housing affordability and other issues as a series of economic development wins position the small central Montana town to add residents for the first time in decades.
Among the key drivers of that growth was last year’s announcement that German industrial equipment company VACOM had chosen Lewistown as the site for its first U.S. manufacturing center, a development that the company has said could create 200 jobs in the 6,000-person city as soon as 2027. Montana Free Press spoke with VACOM Montana General Manager Marcel Klessen, who relocated his family to Lewistown earlier this summer, about the company’s plans and how it hopes to fit its operation into the rural Montana community. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
MTFP: Could you help me understand your business?
Klessen: Our company was founded in the early 1990s and we focused on vacuum technology, everything you need for vacuum applications like channels, flanges, pumps, measuring devices and so on. We typically deliver to big machine-building companies. For example if you have an anti-reflective coating on your glass, then this glass is in a vacuum machine and we have delivered parts to the machine-building company. So it’s industrial vacuums — it’s not cleaning your living room.
In the early 2000s, there came up a new technology, UV lithography — you use that for [computer] chip manufacturing. They were the first lithography process which had to go to vacuum applications. And if you go in a vacuum, there are a lot of problems appearing, for example outgassing. If you create a vacuum, then contamination like residuals from fingerprints or from coolants, they go to the vacuum and they can then destroy your parts.
So they have to set up these high-purity applications. So, we are part of this from the beginning to go this way, starting with cleaning our own products and then moving on. And later on, we generate this cleaning service.
MTFP: I’m talking to people in Lewistown about land-use planning and culture change and how you accommodate new people, which is a challenge anywhere you have economic development. How is VACOM thinking about working with the community here to come in without changing things in a way that people perhaps regret down the road?
Klessen: We are here to work together with the community and build something together. So it’s not our aim to make our own German bubble here. We know that we have to change our way of working to the people which live here. So I can’t bring processes from Germany one by one and come to another mentality and different people and say “OK — do it that way.” We have to learn from our workforce how they can manage what has to be done and then we will be adjusting our processes. And that’s the same with the community for us. We are new here, so we have to fit in the community that’s already there.
We are trying to participate in the events here, to become slowly part of the community. That’s part of my work. We are not here for sitting in our house and not talking to anyone.
The other thing is we are not planning to bring a lot of not-Montana people here. I think it will be a good match and very helpful for us to have local people in our facility and to work together with them, so to prevent from building a bubble. We don’t plan to bring 200 people from Germany or so — that would make the task to fit in the community even harder.
MTFP: Why did the company choose Lewistown instead of someplace like Bozeman, or Las Vegas, or someplace on an interstate highway where there are a bunch of manufacturing companies around?
Klessen: It’s always tough to find the right workforce and to have them for a long time. And in communities where you have a lot of other industrial companies it’s even harder, let’s say. We are comfortable with getting people and training them on the job. We need a lot of effort to get the people to level that they can do the job in the quality we need. We like to have employees for a very long time. And so we decided to come to a community where we do not have 20 other companies who work in cleanrooms and with high-purity applications.
Klessen said VACOM’s initial step in Lewistown will be to open a cleanroom facility in an existing building previously used as a diesel repair shop, employing between 20 and 25 workers when it begins operations as soon as next year. The company then plans to add a manufacturing operation in another existing building before ultimately expanding into a custom-built campus that is currently in the planning stages.