It's been just over a week since news broke that France-based company Roquette plans to build a $400-million pea protein extraction facility in the RM of Portage la Prairie.

The plant is expected to create 150 permanent jobs with an estimated annual combined payroll of around $9-million. The construction phase will create another 300 jobs and will begin later this year. No surprise, the incoming facility is being labelled by many as a big boost for the Portage la Prairie area. A big win for the community.

So how exactly did the RM of Portage la Prairie land Roquette? PortageOnline News caught up with Reeve Kam Blight, who gave a brief timeline of the negotiation process.

2012: An individual from Roquette visits Portage la Prairie for the first time. Blight, and then Portage Mayor Earl Porter, meet with the Roquette representative. Portage is just one of the many stops in Roquette's initial survey of potential landing spots across North America. "Roquette was just kicking tires and see what was out there," Blight recalls. "Nothing really materialized from that until years later."

2016: In April, Roquette contacts the Portage Regional Economic Development office and former executive director Douglas Barill facilitates meetings between key stakeholders from the city and RM, and Roquette. Negotiations begin to ramp up. Countless meetings occur over a period of months between the RM, city, provincial government and Roquette.

"It was a very exciting process to be a part of," Blight says. "We didn't know exactly where we were at. There was a lot of fact finding and information gather going on at first. That really involved engineers at the city of Portage la Prairie and people from our municipality."

As negotiations continue, the RM and city get indication they're on a list of five possible sites being considered by Roquette. Negotiations ramp up and begin to focus on specifics, mainly dollars and cents. Roquette narrows its list further. It's now down to Portage la Prairie and a site in Saskatchewan.

"The competitive juices were really starting to flow through all of us," Blight recalls. "I can't even begin to tell you how many meetings we had with different individuals from Roquette."

"There was a lot of closed door meetings that took place," continues Blight. "The bottom line was, the city and ourselves were very excited to entertain the idea of Roquette coming. However we needed to know what their ask was going to be, because it could have been too rich for our blood. We definitely weren't going to sell the farm to make this deal happen."

The city and RM feel they have the edge in terms of location. All the stakeholders and Roquette keep talking. Land, dollars and cents all get discussed. Then, finally, an agreement is reached.

"In the end, the RM of Portage la Prairie gave a 62 per cent tax incentive over a five-year period which will result in up to approximately $800,000 going back to Roquette," Blight explains. "There will be some works done in the area of the site, which we were going to do anyways as were develop it into an industrial park, which we no longer are, because the land is all sold. Any other parts of the work that we're going to be doing that's going to require some money outlay is going to be recovered through a provincial program called TIFF, tax incremental financing. Those details we're working out right now, but all our money will be recoverable with interest on certain things."

"I think as it turned out things worked out very, very well for ourselves and for Roquette ... we're very excited to see what the future holds with Roquette as part of our community."

See related story: "Tax Exemption Helped Bring New Plant to Portage"