United Parcel Service Inc. has leased the former Samsung building in West Jacksonville for additional package-processing capacity while its hub expansion is under development.
The facility will be completed this fall in time for the holiday volumne surge.
The 400,000-square-foot building is at 12400 Presidents Court in Westlake Industrial Park.
“This will give us hub processing capacity while the construction of the Jax hub is underway,” spokeswoman Susan Rosenberg said by email.
She said UPS will be able to use that extra processing capacity during the November-December holiday shipping season.
Rosenberg, UPS public relations director, said the new portion of the Jacksonville hub will be partially open by fall 2018 but the full project won’t be open until fall 2019.
UPS does not disclose the terms of its real estate contracts, she said, so the length of the lease was not available.
Rosenberg said the interior build-out with conveyor systems at the Westlake building won’t be completed until the fall.
She said UPS will shift some workers from the existing location in Westside Industrial Park while it is under construction as some tractor-trailer loads move to Westlake for processing.
Customers won’t see the familiar brown trucks coming from Westlake, though.
“They will continue to be dispatched from the delivery center adjacent to the main hub,” Rosenberg said.
The former Samsung Electronics America Inc. warehouse became available after Samsung’s lease expired at the end of February.
Samsung initially leased part of the building but expanded into the entire center.
While Samsung did not previously respond to questions about leaving the center, news reports said Samsung would lease space in the Orlando region.
Samsung had been associated with the Westlake warehouse for more than four years. The Westlake warehouse was built in 2007.
Westlake is west of Pritchard and Chaffee roads, north of Interstate 10. It is owned by LIT Westlake LLC, whose manager is Clarion Partners executive John Killian in Dallas.
Atlanta-based UPS is investing $196 million to expand its Jacksonville ground package hub, adding more than 260,000 square feet to its building at 4420 Imeson Road in Westside Industrial Park and adding advanced technology and operations automation.
City Council adopted a resolution for a $4.3 million taxpayer incentives package for Project Mountain, the city’s code name for UPS as it went through the legislative process.
The company filed plans with the city to expand its 532,000-square-foot regional package distribution center, creating a nearly 800,000-square-foot center.
UPS said when the expansion is completed in the fall of 2019, the hub’s capacity will increase by one-third to more than 80,000 packages processed per hour.
The Jacksonville UPS operation is one of the company’s larger U.S. ground processing facilities and an important transit point to connect road and rail in the UPS network, the president of the company’s Florida district said in a November news release.
The release said more than 1,650 full- and part-time UPS employees work at both the hub and its adjacent four package centers. The incentives legislation said the global logistics solutions company would create 10 jobs that would pay an average $50,675 a year by the end of 2020.
As part of the expansion, UPS said the Jacksonville facility will be retrofitted to include the company’s latest sorting and processing technology with advanced automation designed to increase the building’s flexibility and response to customer needs.
The UPS center was developed in 1989. Information submitted with the site plan says the total property boundary is about 130 acres.
A zoning application showed it would increase parking spaces from 954 to 1,661. The legislation said Project Mountain already employs 965 people.
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