May 21,2019
A month after filing those long awaited building plans for a huge new ground shipping, package sorting facility in the Visalia Industrial Park, United Parcel Service has received a grading and foundation permit from the city and construction is underway. In addition they have filed to build a shell building..
The new 350,000sf complex at the NE corner of Plaza and Riggin may employ up to 600. City economic development manager Devon Jones says the 58 acre project has a second and third expansion option adding up to another 117,000 sf.
Consrtuction the foundation and shell has started as of mid May 2019.
The plant is expected to open for the Holiday shipping season, late this year. UPS bought the dirt in 2017. The new facility will not handle any air shipped packages that go to Fresno.
The contractor on the big Visalia project is Layton Construction.The company was founded in Utah in 1953 by Alan W. Layton, a decorated World War II veteran, and has grown to almost 1,000 employees, with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and 10 offices coast-to-coast.
Layton built the giant Salt Lake City hub for UPS, about double the size of the new Visalia complex.The UPS Regional Hub in Salt Lake City is 840,000 square feet and boasts more than 300 inbound and outbound dock doors. The facility is capable of processing 69,000 packages every hour. Construction value has been listed as $275 million.
Speculitively,that would put the value of the Visalia facility, almost half the size of the Salt Lake plant, at likely well over $100 million – what would be by far the latest construction project in Visalia history!
Last year all new commercial building in Visalia totaled $39 million and in the past decade, all commercial building activity adds up is $233 million according the city website.
UPS ground revenue per piece increased almost 3% says the latest UPS financial report.The report says in 2019, the company will be bringing on an additional 20 new or retrofit automated facilities globally that also represents roughly 5 million square feet or 400,000 packages per hour of automated sortation capacity in the organization. And these expanded automated facilities are in Tennessee and California…says the report.
New facilities will be highly automated targeting we remain some 30% to 35% efficiency improvement when compared to more traditional buildings.
Boosting the development is news with past few days the the Teamsters union has signed a five year agreement with UPS.The UPS contract includes wage increases of $4.15 per hour for both full-time and part-time workers over the term of the contract and increases the part-time start rate by $2.50 retroactively to August 1, 2018. The agreement requires UPS to create 5,000 new full-time jobs