The undisclosed tenant for an 840,000-square-foot industrial building under construction in the Fairfax Industrial District has been disclosed.
NorthPoint Development COO Chad Meyer said his firm is developing the $55 million facility for one of its biggest, most important tenants: General Motors.
The automaker will occupy the facility under a long-term lease and will use it as a logistics center for the management of critical and time-sensitive manufacturing components used at its nearby Fairfax Assembly Plant, just east of the new building. It will employ about 500.
NorthPoint announced in July that it had started work on the huge build-to-suit project, which received a 75 percent property tax abatement from the Unified Government of Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kan.
But until now, the Unified Government and NorthPoint have kept the building’s use and user under wraps.
Meyer said Wednesday that GM had given him permission to disclose details about the project, which is expected to be operational by April.
ARCO National Construction-KC Inc. is the general contractor and is expected to have all steel in place and walls erected by the end of next week. A roof will be in place over the mammoth facility before Christmas, Meyer said.
The new logistics center is the second structure NorthPoint has developed in its Central Industrial Park. In 2015, construction was completed for the first: a $10 million, 74,000-square-foot Inergy Automotive Systems plant that manufactures plastic fuel tank systems for Fairfax Assembly Plant. It employs about 200.
Central Industrial Park is being developed on a 74-acre Fairfax site that housed a General Motors assembly plant that closed in 1986. The site was placed in a federal trust — called the RACER Trust — after the automaker filed for government-assisted bankruptcy in 2009, and Northpoint bought the site from the trust in 2013.
Meyer credited Mark Fountain, a partner at True North Industrial Realty, for bringing the Central Industrial Park opportunity to NorthPoint.
“He deserves credit for having the vision of how important this site could be despite all the environmental issues,” Meyer said.
Kaw Valley Companies Inc. has helped NorthPoint overcome those issues, Meyer added. Kaw Valley demolished underground structures and utilities associated with the former assembly plant, he said, and it brought in 150,000 cubic yards of dirt to make the site developable.
Meyer said the new GM logistics center now rising from the site is part of more than 4 million square feet of build-to-suit development NorthPoint is working on for GM at sites nationwide.
Besides Kansas City, Kan., the GM projects are in Fort Wayne, Ind.; Wentzville, Mo.; Spring Hill, Tenn.; Lordstown, Ohio; Bowling Green, Ky.; and Arlington, Texas.
“We are grateful and honored that General Motors would choose to partner with us as much as they are,” Meyers said. “It’s pretty humbling to be able to work with a company of that size and scale and be able to win repeated business with it across the country.”