The prospect of a Quality Pork Processing plant in Albert Lea won’t get the near-unanimous support of residents the way a Ford Motor Company plant did. The wages won’t be as good, and some can’t help but note the parallel with the now-departed Farmland plant. Why would the city cling to its meat-packing past?

But the plant, if one is built, can make a positive contribution to the city despite any of that. In fact, the city council has done the right thing by passing a package of aid designed to provide land and a building for the meat-processing facility, if the Austin company decides to expand into Albert Lea.

The first thing to note is that 100 or more jobs is just that: 100 or more jobs. Whenever there are more jobs, more people are getting paid and more people are spending their money. The wages from any new jobs will be felt elsewhere in the community several times over.

And while some people can’t get over the link to the city’s meat-packing past, the fact is that the operations that would take place at a QPP plant would be vastly different from those people remember from Wilson & Co. The building will be brand-new and modern, and a processing facility, not a slaughterhouse. The business of the plant will be meat, yes, but that’s just another commodity like any other.

When the city has a chance to add jobs and cash to the economy, as it will if Quality Pork decides to come this way, it should not say no. If the company accepts Albert Lea’s offer, it can become another small piece in the city’s diverse industrial economy, replacing some of the jobs lost at Farmland but not being large enough to define the city’s economy as Wilson once did.

Tribune editorials represent the opinion of the newspaper’s management and editorial staff.