A South Point company has received a $10 million loan for the purpose of expanding its operations.

McGinnis, Inc., received the loan through the Ohio Enterprise Bond Fund Loan program at an interest rate to be determined at closing for a 13-year term for equipment and construction of buildings.

The Ohio Enterprise Bond Fund provides funding for land and building acquisition, construction, expansion or renovation, and equipment purchases for commercial or industrial projects.

Bill Jessie, the chief financial officer for McGinnis, Inc., said the company is considering doing a capital project of building a sandblasting and painting facility on its South Point site.

“We are still evaluating it,” Jessie said. “But we have authorization for financing through the state so it will be another month or two before we decide if we are definitely moving forward with it or not.”

The company proposal is to purchase equipment and construct a sandblasting and painting facility with two portable buildings, a blast room, staging building, and drying building. The new facility will allow the company to provide repairing, replating, renovating, sandblasting, and painting services to large tank barges and dry docks. This more than $13 million project is expected to create 50 positions at the project site within the first three years.

Jessie said the economy is strong in the barge transportation sector.

“We haven’t seen any downturn,” he said. “This facility will offer services to other barge lines. We think there is a demand for that product out there and that’s why we are moving in that direction.”

McGinnis Inc.’s core business includes boat and barge repair, cleaning, fleeting, towing, barge loading, and unloading and fuel sales. McGinnis has five locations that serve vessels along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

The South Point facility serves as the home office with the company’s largest shipyard and five dry docks. The company also has site mechanics, machine and electrical shops, and a fleet of five harbor boats.

On Monday, the Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher announced that McGinnis Inc. and several other companies throughout the state received funds for job retention and creation.

The funds, which are pending State Controlling Board approval, are expected to retain 4,244 positions and create 466 jobs.

“The organizations approved today for state assistance are developing important projects that will keep thousands of Ohioans on the job,” said Fisher, who also serves as the Director of the Ohio Department of Development. “Job retention is a critical component of economic development, and valued members of our business community that reinvest in Ohio are not only retaining important jobs for our workers, they are reaffirming the value of the many available assets that initially brought them to Ohio.”

Infra-Metals Co., to be located in Portsmouth has been awarded a $2 million 166 Direct Loan at an interest rate of 1 percent for the first year and 3 percent for the remaining 14 years of the 15-year term, and a $6,430,000 Ohio Enterprise Bond Fund loan for a 15-year term at an interest rate to be determined at closing.

Money will be used to acquire land and construct a new building. Infra-Metals is a structural steel service center that distributes and processes beams, plate, pipe tubing and merchant bars to service manufacturing and the non-residential and energy construction industries.

The company proposes to acquire land and construct a 250,000-square-foot building that will serve as a warehouse to inventory and process steel products, an office building, rail spur, and barge slip.

The more-than-$8.5 million project is expected to create 52 positions at the project site within the first three years of the project’s initial operation.