BATON ROUGE – A Louisiana-based HVAC company is expanding its Baton Rouge operations.

ChillCo Inc. will be developing a $2.4 million expansion in Baton Rouge to expand its remanufacturing capabilities and strengthen service operations across south Louisiana. The company already has been in Baton Rouge for 15 years on Airline Highway.

The company outgrew a facility they were renting and wanted to invest in the community and buy, renovate and update a new facility, ChillCo said. The updates and renovations are nearly 90% of the way complete, they added.

The expansion in Baton Rouge is part of an $8 million investment across Louisiana, including renovating its St. Tammany Parish headquarters.

"ChillCo, Inc. has been headquartered in St Tammany Parish for almost our entire existence," ChillCo CEO Frank Myers said. "The foundations and key members of our company have raised families here. As we expanded our operations to Baton Rouge and ultimately to the entire Gulf South, we felt it was important to stay within the communities we helped build. We are very excited to showcase our new building on our Lacombe property that will help us warehouse our rental fleet, but we are also very excited to unveil our new facility in Baton Rouge."

The company's expansion will create 38 direct new jobs with an average salary of $73,170 while retaining 68 existing positions.