Speaking at the groundbreaking ceremony for South32’s Centro remote operating center in Nogales, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs hailed the development as providing a “new chapter for Nogales, the surrounding region and Santa Cruz County.”
“The impact that this project will have on this community is going to be transformative,” Hobbs said. “We’re seeing a historic investment of $2.16 billion in Arizona, the largest private investment in Southern Arizona history.”
Other speakers at the groundbreaking on Wednesday, April 23, were Nogales Mayor Jorge Maldonado, Santa Cruz County District 2 Supervisor Rudy Molera and South32 Hermosa President Pat Risner. The ceremonies began with a traditional blessing from Alex Seowtewa, representing the Pueblo of Zuni and neighboring indigenous populations.
The Centro complex, located west of Interstate 19 and just north of Mariposa Road, is scheduled to be completed in 2027. It will accommodate roughly 200 full-time employees who will use advanced automation technology to remotely monitor and operate the underground and surface equipment at the Hermosa mining operation in the Patagonia Mountains.
“The biggest reason why we’re here today is our commitment to ensuring that the economic benefits of this development are maximized and remain in Santa Cruz County,” Risner said.
“Most of the time the industry puts these facilities in big cities; you can put them anywhere. So the traditional thinking would have been you put this facility in Tucson. It’s easier to hire people, there’s more to choose from. The reason we put it in Nogales is to create hundreds of highly skilled, good-paying jobs right here in Santa Cruz County to maximize local employment.”
Local job creation was a focus of all the speakers at the groundbreaking. South32 is projecting a workforce of approximately 850 to 900 employees, and Risner said the company is committed to “at least 80 percent of our long-term workforce will be existing residents of Santa Cruz County.”
“These jobs will provide compensation twice the average household income in Santa Cruz County, helping uplift the economy and creating long-term prosperity.”
Said Molera: “These opportunities are going to be for our local kids, and that’s exciting. Pat is really making a point to hire locally and to make sure the people he brings into work here are staying here and spending money here locally.”
To fill those jobs, South32 has created a task force with local education leaders and county officials to focus on post-secondary education and training needs. While the training programs will be geared toward high school graduates, the company hopes to align with county school districts on a career-development pipeline.
After the morning’s groundbreaking ceremony had concluded, Risner spoke with the PRT about various aspects of the Hermosa project.
He said South32 will kick off its workforce training program in September, in collaboration with Santa Cruz County Provisional Community College and Pima Community College. Pima College will provide the curriculum and resources for the program to be delivered in Santa Cruz County by the provisional college district. The first offering will be an electrical program, which will have a completion time of two to three years. Other disciplines that won’t require as much training time will be rolled out subsequently.
“A lot of the jobs here at Centro, we can train people that don’t have mining experience in 18 months,” Risner said. “We don’t need to start those yet, but that’s the real key to local employment and having a local workforce. We can train people here in Nogales and Santa Cruz County quite quickly to do a lot of these roles.”
Risner said South32 will be mining 4.3 million tons of zinc a year from the Hermosa project, making it one of the ten largest zinc mines in the world. As additional deposits are unearthed, the mine’s lifespan could extend beyond 30 years. He said the company is still conducting feasibility studies on manganese mining as part of the project, with a potential lifespan of 60 years for those deposits.
While economic development was the focus of the day, Risner also addressed ongoing negotiations of a Community Protection and Benefit Agreement between South32, the city of Nogales, the town of Patagonia and Santa Cruz County. Risner had pneumonia and was unable to attend community input meetings last month but said he has been fully briefed by staff and has read all comments that have been submitted.
“I think it’s very clear over the last few years what’s important to the community around protections, what we need to do more of to make sure people feel comfortable and safe,” he said. “I think (the meetings were) a good confirmation of a lot of the things we’re focused on.”
Risner said he hoped to have a signed agreement by the end of the year, but “we don’t want to force the pace. We need to get it right, mainly from a point where the community’s comfortable with it.”
Environmental concerns have been a major focus of the negotiations, but housing has also been a topic of discussion.
“This is something we haven’t solved yet, but we’re talking about what the roles should be,” he said. “The mayor of Nogales has some initiatives, Mayor (Andy) Wood and [Town Manager] Ron Robinson have some ideas in Patagonia. It’s a little bit different for each part of the community, but we all know that there’s a need. We’re talking about what the roles should be. We want to, and are going to, play a role in supporting those initiatives.”
He acknowledged that different constituencies have different priorities and that Patagonia’s concerns are in some ways unique. The differing priorities may skew the distribution of the economic benefits, however.
“A lot of what we’ve heard from the town of Patagonia, and we’ve tried to honor this, is, ‘We don’t want to become a mining town,’” Risner said. “We’ve put a buffer around Patagonia, where we won’t have any industrial development within the area. We want to maintain the look and feel of Patagonia, that’s why a lot of people are there, so we’re really trying hard not to change that.”
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