Still Hoping for a Federal Courthouse, City Cuts Deal for Chiquita Cannery Property

EUGENE, OR-The third time may be a charm for city officials here in their effort to attract the new home to all federal court operations for Oregon except in the Portland metro area. After shooing the U.S. General Services Administration away from one site and pricing them out of a second, Chiquita has agreed to sell the city its 8.7-acre cannery property and move from it quickly in order to satisfy the GSA’s timetable.

Contingent on the GSA’s selection of the site – the agency also is considering a downtown site in the adjacent city of Springfield, and will make its selection by January – Chiquita has agreed to sell its vegetable cannery to the city for $4.1 million. The city would then sell about half the site to GSA, master plan the rest and then seek a public-private partnership to develop a mixed-use project on the property.

If the GSA picks the Chiquita site, the courthouse property would anchor a city-led effort to gain access to its historically working waterfront and transform it into offices, restaurants, shops, condominiums and walkways to the Willamette River and along its bank. The city would likely sell about 4 acres on the western portion of the triangular lot to the GSA for the courthouse. The rest of the site, which includes several cannery buildings, would be cleared, master-planned, and then solicited to prospective developers interested in following the city’s plan.