L3 Technologies will add 250 employees to its already major Utah workforce

By Brice Wallace

L3 Technologies will add up to 250 jobs in an expansion project in Salt Lake City, the company announced last week.

The announcement came after the company was awarded a tax credit incentive and a training grant by the Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) board. The incentive is tied to the creation of the jobs over nine years, although the company hopes to hire 129 engineers this year, according to Dan Gelston, president of L3 Technologies’ Broadband Communications sector.{mprestriction ids="1,3"}

L3 has about 3,500 employees in Salt Lake City. It began operating in Utah in the 1950s.

New York-based L3 supplies command and control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems and products, training devices and services and more. Its customers included the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. government intelligence agencies, NASA, aerospace contractors and commercial telecommunications and wireless customers.

Speaking to the GOED board by phone, Gelston said the Salt Lake City expansion is tied to L3’s work to develop radio jamming technologies. Last year, L3 and Northrup Grumman each were awarded contracts of about $35 million from the U.S. Navy to develop the jamming technologies to use against military adversaries. The new jamming technology will replace the EA-18G Growler aircraft’s current jammer system, which is about four decades old.

A winning company will be selected in about a year-and-a-half, and that company will go from “a $36 million contract quickly to a multi-billion-dollar contract with decades of legs on it,” Gelston said.

The GOED board approved a tax credit of $1.26 million and a $100,000 Industrial Assistance Fund training grant for L3. The project is expected to result in new total wages of $183 million over nine years and new state tax revenue of nearly $6.8 million during that time. The new jobs will pay an average of $104,600 per year.

L3 and Harris Corp. announced in October they plan to combine through an all-stock merger of equals. Harris has three business segments: communication systems, electronic systems and space and intelligence systems. The combined company, L3 Harris Technologies Inc., would be based in Florida and have a total of nearly 50,000 employees — L3 currently has 31,000 and Harris has 17,000. Gelston said the combined company is looking to consolidate operations into four or five states and said he hopes Utah can be home to at least 5,000 employees.

In Utah, L3 currently has a campus with about 10 buildings but plans to build a $50 million facility to replace its current manufacturing site, which has been in use since 1956. The new facility will serve as a new manufacturing center, allowing for rapid prototyping and development of new products and capabilities in areas such as laser communications and electronic warfare, and will incorporate advanced additive manufacturing and circuit card assembly cells.{/mprestriction}