Amazon delivery facility confirmed to open in Bremerton in 2020

BREMERTON — Global e-commerce giant Amazon is the tenant for a proposed warehouse and distribution center under construction near Bremerton National Airport, a company spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday.

The project, a 117,000-square-foot building on Bree Drive east of Highway 3 and just northeast of the airport, is currently being developed by Panattoni Development Company Inc. ALM Bremerton, a company registered in Delaware, purchased the 30-acre property last month from Stan Palmer.

An Amazon spokeswoman said that the building is a “last-mile” delivery facility and will open in 2020. “Last mile” facilities receive packages from larger Amazon warehouses, load them into vans and deliver them to customers. They usually offer “hundreds” of full- and part-time jobs, the spokeswoman said.

Bremerton Mayor Greg Wheeler said he was “proud” that private companies are now looking to expand into the city. The mayor has said in the past that the warehouse will bring 150-200 jobs to Bremerton.

“They’re going to see we have a high-quality lifestyle, we have a high-quality workforce, and there’s a lot of benefits from doing business here,” Wheeler said.

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In a site plan review application filed with the city, the warehouse is described as “similar to a FedEx or UPS facility.” Plans call for a concrete building with exterior dock doors for truck-loading and additional overhead doors to load vans, 12,000 square feet of office space, and more than 950 parking stalls for vans. Panattoni estimated in its application that the project would generate about 965 daily vehicle trips on weekdays.

While Panattoni filed permits for the project last fall, the developer and city officials have declined to name the tenant of the building until now. Amazon approached the city in 2019, Wheeler said. The company is moving fast on the project and asked the city to agree to meet its timelines.

“We committed to meeting those specific timelines, we agreed upon them, and we committed to getting it done,” Wheeler said.

Panattoni – one of the largest developers of industrial and office buildings in the country – has worked on other warehouse projects linked to Amazon., including a 3.6 million-square-foot facility in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. The developer did not return a call requesting comment from the Kitsap Sun.

Port of Bremerton commissioner Axel Strakeljahn said he has not been directly told about the building’s tenant but said the port is “excited” about the facility and what it brings to the area. Panattoni is leasing a small parcel of land from the port to help with water infiltration.

“It’s big for the port, it’s big for the community,” Strakeljahn said.

FedEx is the only retailer currently using Bremerton National Airport to ship freight into Kitsap County. But the new warehouse brings “potential for increased freight mobility,” Strakeljahn said.

Wheeler added that the city is looking at “road construction projects that will deal with congestion” in the area.

Amazon has ramped up its construction of “last mile” delivery facilities over the last several years, according to data from MWPVL International, a logistics consulting firm based in Canada. MWPVL tracks Amazon’s global supply chain, including the different kinds of buildings the company uses for distribution. At the end of 2019, the firm had recorded 162 delivery stations in the U.S., up from 123 in 2018.

Locations for new last-mile delivery facilities are chosen “based on customer demand,” the Amazon spokeswoman said.

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