From Don Covington

Circus_Family_Feud_09dc4, a photo by bucklesw1 on Flickr. Feld Entertainment to relocate 190 jobs to Florida Feld Entertainment, which produces shows from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to Monster Jam to Disney On Ice, will permanently relocate 190 jobs from its Vienna corporate headquarters to a new $20 million world production headquarters on Florida’s Gulf Coast, the company announced Monday. The move, which will take place over the next five years, will still leave more than 100 jobs at its headquarters in a Tysons Corner office building. “I am pretty sure we will always have a level of corporate presence in the Washington area,” said Kenneth Feld, chairman of the company, which is one of the largest of its kind in the world. The move is part of a corporate consolidation designed to put much of Feld’s massive operations, from refurbishment of its circus trains to costume creation to choreography of its ice and Monster Jam shows, under one roof. Feld Entertainment, which began as a Washington record store more than half a century ago, employs 2,500 people worldwide. The new facility in Ellenton, Fla., replaces its current operations center in nearby Palmetto, where it has been for 20 years. The new 47-acre campus is on the site of a former General Electric turbine plant and includes 100,000 square feet of office space with an additional 450,000 square feet of manufacturing space in two buildings. Construction on the new campus is expected to take a year. Feld said he had been eyeing the location for 15 years, referring to it as one of the few “unique opportunities” that come around. “It’s got stuff that really works for us in every aspect of our business,” he said. “To build it, we probably could never have economically made it work.”