NEW YORK CITY-Despite tax breaks and incentives offered from across the Hudson River, the 112-acre Hunts Point Terminal Produce Cooperative--the largest wholesale produce market in the world--agreed to a three-year lease extension at its longtime home in the South Bronx yesterday. Under the agreement, a spokeswoman for the New York City Development Corp. tells GlobeSt.com that the city and Co-op officials will negotiate terms over the next nine months that go beyond the three-year lease at the market, located at 772 Edgewater Road.

But even with the lease in place, the pressure isn’t off, says Stephen Katzman co-president of Hunts Point Terminal Produce Cooperative. Katzman says the produce co-op is now looking to construct a new, modernized facility on the site, a project estimated to cost around $320 million. “It still keeps the pressure on us to come up with a design and to go out together with New York City and New York State to find different sources of money at the federal and state level to help us build a facility,” he says. “We are going to need transportation dollars, homeland security dollars and everything else. It is real tough to do when you don’t have a lease, and now that we have a lease, we can do this together and hopefully find enough money to build it.”

As part of the agreement, the produce co-op can only engage in discussions exclusively with the city during the nine-month period, he adds. And after mulling a 10-year option in New Jersey, the co-op wanted to make sure they were able to build a new facility and operate it affordably. “That’s what we are going to be doing over the next nine months exclusively with New York,” Katzman says. “After those nine months are over, if we find out we are not able to build on this facility, then we will have to go find somewhere where we can build it.”