Sacramento-based Panattoni Development Corp. is doing just that in a joint venture with Seattle-based landowner ASPI Group on an 800-acre industrial development in the Moses Lake area, which lies about 60 miles north of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and 40 miles east of the Mighty Columbia River. Both Mike Wells, a Panattoni partner in Portland, and Kim Foster, corporate counsel for ASPI, tell GlobeSt.com the site has all the makings of a major industrial and air cargo center.
The airport is Grant County International, a 5,000-acre development with a runway more than two miles long and 300-feet wide. It was built during the Cold War to accommodate the possibility of lumbering B52 aircraft loaded with Hanford-made nuclear weapons headed for Russia. In its current incarnation, the airport serves as a regional "Tracon," managing air traffic throughout the Pacific Northwest while also serving as the region's emergency diversion facility.
"It is a bona fide international airport with 24-hour customs and a foreign-trade zone," says Foster. Moreover, Foster says the Grant County PUD, which owns two damns on the Columbia and makes large profits from selling electricity to California, has "teched-out" the airport, investing heavily in a fiber-optic network. The result is industrial sites with the equivalent of one-half million T-1 lines, he says.
The cherry on top, says Foster, is that the cost of industrial electricity in Moses Lake is the cheapest in the nation at just two pennies per kilowatt hour. In terms of what that could mean to a tenant, Foster says the operator of a one-million-sf distribution warehouse would save $1 million annually if it moved its facility from the Seattle area to the Moses Lake area.
Wells says he expects developing the park will take several years, with a few projects each year ranging in sizes from 50,000 sf to 1 million sf. He says the joint venture opportunity was brought to his attention by Colliers International brokers Wilma Warshak (Seattle) and Paul Breuer (Portland). Bellevue, WA-based MulvannyG2 Architecture will provide planning and architectural services for the project.
"The availability of land in Western Washington and Oregon is limited," says Wells. "Here is a site that has lots of land, and expenses like utilities and labor are a lot less than areas like Puget Sound. And, we think the proximity of the airport can support international air cargo. That's a good asset."
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