It isn’t the biggest development to ever come to Lowndes County, but Wednesday’s announcement that a new FedEx Ground facility is underway at the Golden Triangle Industrial Park off Highway 82 is something of an outlier in one respect, Golden Triangle Development LINK CEO Joe Max Higgins said.
“It’s kind of a different kind of deal,” Higgins said. “Most of the deals involved giving the company the site and almost all of them involve tax abatements. Neither of those things happened here. There’s no cost to us. In fact, the company bought the land from the (Lowndes County Industrial Authority) for $10,000 an acre. It’s a 41-acre site, so that means they paid $410,000 for the site. It’s a good deal for us.”
The new 217,000 square-foot facility on Charleigh Ford Road will replace two small FedEx Ground facilities (15,000 square feet) located on Frontage Road and should be completed some time next year, the announcement noted.
The Westmoreland Company, based in Huntsville, Alabama, purchased the land and will develop the property, which will be leased to FedEx, Higgins said. Higgins estimated the capital investment of the project could go as high as $50 million.
“It’s $25 million to develop and build the property, and it’s not uncommon for that much to be spent on equipment. So I’d say the total investment will be in the neighborhood of $50 million,” Higgins said.
The new facility, which the LINK had previously referred to as Project Lettuce, could create as many as 100 jobs, Higgins said.
“We consider these good-paying jobs, even the part-time jobs,” he said. “A lot of the jobs created will be delivery people, so these are jobs that don’t require a lot of special training.”
Noting that the current FedEx facility had outgrown its capacity, Higgins said the new facility reflects the boom in e-commerce.
“We’ve seen an uptick in interest in our region for last-mile delivery and other logistics projects, so it is not a surprise that FedEx would want to increase their footprint in the Golden Triangle,” Higgins said. “We’re happy to continue our partnership with them and look forward to more opportunities for work for our community.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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