United Parcel Service is preparing to install the bulk of the conveyors in its Westside Industrial Park plant at a cost of $77.5 million.
The Atlanta-based package delivery company, which is working on a $196 million expansion of the Westside hub, applied to the city to install conveyors in its parcel shipping ground hub at 4420 Imeson Road.
Incentives legislation approved by the city in November 2016 specified that the $196 million expansion would include $150 million in equipment, furniture and fixtures.
The pending permit shows that the $77.5 million project is the first phase.
Material Handling Systems Inc. of Louisville, Kentucky, is the contractor.
In November 2016, UPS said the Imeson Road facility would be expanded and retrofitted by fall 2019 with advanced technology and operations automation.
UPS said the Jacksonville facility will include the company’s latest sorting and processing technology with advanced automation. For example, it said six-sided decode tunnels will replace traditional scanning to rapidly capture package information from address labels.
Also, small, lightweight packages typical of e-commerce will flow through new systems in loads built for Florida destinations.
Amazon.com wasn’t mentioned in the legislation or in project descriptions, but UPS works with the e-commerce retailer that has two fulfillment centers in northwest and west Jacksonville.
The UPS center was developed in 1989 and it is almost doubling its size to more than 900,000 square feet of space.
The incentives call for $43 million of city funding through a Recapture Enhanced Value grant that would provide a refund of 50 percent over five years of the increase in real and personal property taxes generated at the site from the expansion.
The expansion will increase the hub’s capacity by one-third to more than 80,000 packages processed per hour.
UPS told the city that more than 1,650 full- and part-time UPS employees work at the hub and its four adjacent package centers.
The project would create 10 jobs at an annual average $50,675 by the end of 2020.
As that hub is being expanded, UPS is retrofitting a 400,000-square-foot warehouse not far away in Westlake Industrial Park to handle additional package processing.