Port of Centralia Commission presentation leads to latest debate over ongoing warehouse moratorium

A presentation from the owners of a new Centralia warehouse at a recent Port of Centralia Commission meeting exploded into yet another debate over warehouses and Harrison Avenue traffic.

Logistics Property Company LLC (LPC) and members of two local unions representing construction workers and operating engineers joined the usual concerned citizens at the Port of Centralia Commission meeting on Wednesday afternoon.

LPC Western Region Executive Vice President Dennis Rice gave an update on the company's nearby warehouse, which is currently under construction.

Representatives of the two union groups spoke against the Centralia moratorium on warehouses and logistics centers during public comment and praised the work on the nearby Fords Prairie warehouse and plans for additional industrial development.

The presentation from LPC brought on questions from a group of local residents who regularly attend Port of Centralia Commission meetings and have in the past raised concerns over large warehouse construction.

Questions eventually led to a heated exchange between port commissioners over the issue of robotics replacing warehouse jobs. The port commissioners eventually cut off further questions from the public to move on with the rest of the meeting.

The meeting lasted roughly an hour and 40 minutes, with the majority of that time dedicated to discussion of the Fords Prairie warehouse and the prospect of more to come.

Updates from LPC

Rice attended a public port commission meeting last week for the third time since LPC purchased a property in Fords Prairie roughly one year ago for development.

The site has popped up rapidly with the outer structure of an approximately 600,000-square-foot warehouse, visible along Harrison Avenue north of Centralia, across the street from the Fords Prairie Animal Clinic.

According to Rice, LPC expects completion of the property, which he referred to as Fords Prairie Industrial Park Building 1, by August of this year. The company also expects the portion of Harrison Avenue near the construction site to be reduced to just one lane of traffic starting in the coming weeks and likely extending through November as it builds out a 36-inch sewer main line required by the City of Centralia.

"We'll be controlling traffic on the top end and the bottom end and trying to move traffic as efficiently as possible," Rice said.

He added that crews will be working on the line 24/7 in an effort to complete it as quickly as possible.

The sewer line is just one bit of infrastructure among many improvements LPC has had to construct at the request of the City of Centralia. Other improvements include frontage improvements such as sidewalks and paving a short length of road extending west from Harrison. Rice said LPC hopes the road will be extended to connect with Gallagher Road to the south.

A schematic for the warehouse shown during the presentation also showed a roundabout connecting the roadway extension to Harrison Avenue. But, according to Rice, installing a roundabout will be left to the City of Centralia and Lewis County to tackle as they seek to widen Harrison Avenue in the future.

Members of the audience questioned Rice about what business would occupy the new building on Harrison and also once again raised concerns over truck traffic and robotics.

According to Rice, LPC is looking for a single tenant to occupy the large warehouse and has spoken with multiple interested parties, but none have officially committed to the facility.

Rice said LPC constructed the building without a single tenant in mind but fully expected the building to be occupied, stating that it's more common for companies to shop around for already constructed buildings than to commission the construction of one from the ground up.

"A lot of tenants at six months, they say, 'We need a building. We need it by this date,'" Rice said. "That's why we do the buildings. We're speculating that there's going to be a user there."

Rice expects the tenant that does eventually occupy the building will pay around $600,000 a month to lease the space.

Retired state Sen. Gary Odegard raised concerns over truck traffic, to which the LPC team responded they have seen other communities do more to enforce officially established truck routes.

Rice said at other properties they have worked with local governments to select a chosen truck route and include in their lease that the tenant must direct trucks along the route. The LPC team added that local governments will even enforce the truck routes more severely, calling on local law enforcement to ticket trucks violating the routes until truck drivers adhere.

LPC plans to send trucks from the new facility northward to use the Rochester interchange to access Interstate 5.

Jan Banevich and Port Commissioner Ally Pickard led off the questions and concerns around robotics replacing jobs in warehouse and industrial properties like those developed by LPC. Those in the room seemed to disagree on the role robotics would play in the properties in the future. Pickard and others insisted that robotics had already replaced jobs in the area while Commissioner Kyle Markstrom pushed back against the idea and argued that automation has been in the industry for many years and should not be cause for concern.

Rice pushed back on the idea that robotics were replacing jobs in its industrial properties in any meaningful way.

"You always have human beings in that building to kind of assist if there's problems and things of that nature, and those are typically more engineers and higher paying jobs," Rice said.

Unions against the moratorium

International Union of Operating Engineers Local 612 Business Representative Chad Campbell and Laborers' International Union of North America Local 252 Organizing Director Anthony Johnson both spoke during public comment.

Both spoke in favor of developments on and near Port of Centralia property, with Campbell referring to "responsible industrial development plans."

Both also spoke out against a permitting moratorium on warehouses more than 250,000 square feet in size enforced by the City of Centralia and lamented the potential loss of local construction jobs promised by planned development.

"Construction workers, trades, people, material suppliers and small businesses all feel the economic impact immediately when planned developments are frozen," Campbell said.

Johnson briefly announced that his union was also against the moratorium and called for a return to work. At the same time, he called on developers and local governments to require the projects to use local labor and take on local apprenticeships.

During the presentation by Rice late in the meeting, he at times went to lengths to emphasize the amount of local jobs created by warehouse construction. According to an update on the Fords Prairie property, its construction is made possible by 147 construction jobs, 68 of which employ local labor.

The Fords Prairie Industrial Park Building 1 was the last large warehouse to receive permits from the City of Centralia before the city council enacted a moratorium on warehouses larger than 250,000 square feet in September of last year.

City staff identified nine similar proposed facilities they expected to apply for construction in the following year and a half.

For previous reporting by The Chronicle on LPC and the Centralia warehouse moratorium, visit https://tinyurl.com/bde7n6nc.

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