United Parcel Service Inc. announced Friday it will invest $196 million to expand its Jacksonville ground package hub in the wake of City Council approval Wednesday to provide incentives for the project.
As UPS outlined in previously filed city plans, it will add more than 260,000 square feet to its building at 4420 Imeson Road in Westside Industrial Park and add advanced technology and operations automation.
Council adopted a resolution for a $4.3 million taxpayer incentives package for what was called Project Mountain.
The Atlanta-based company 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.
Kim Wyant, president of UPS’s Florida District, said in a news release that Jacksonville’s operation is one of the larger U.S. ground processing facilities and an important transit point to connect road and rail in the UPS network.
According to the release, more than 1,650 full and part-time UPS employees work at both the hub and its adjacent four package centers.
It said the company has committed to new full-time jobs as well as expanded employee parking as part of the plan.
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.
Changes in the building footprint provide a larger trailer staging area and another 46 brown package car positions will meet the needs for growing local delivery operations, the release said.
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.
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 that maintain UPS reliability in loads built for destinations throughout Florida.
While not included in the UPS release, Amazon.com is building a fulfillment center 11 miles away along Interstate 295 in Northwest Jacksonville to pick, pack and ship small consumer items.
UPS employs more than 16,500 people across Florida in package delivery, ground freight, aircraft operations, air and ocean freight forwarding and contract logistics.
The company filed plans with the city to expand its 532,000-square-foot regional package distribution center by almost 264,000 square feet, creating a nearly 800,000-square-foot center.
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.
The incentives call for $4.3 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.
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