Jeff Platsky

jplatsky@gannett.com | @JeffPlatsky

Dick's Sporting Goods is returning home, in a sense.

Twenty-two years after the company relocated its corporate headquarters to Pittsburgh, its home-grown chief executive announced Tuesday morning the company will build a $100 million, 650,000-square-foot distribution center less than five miles from its original store on Binghamton's East Side.

When the center opens in early 2018 on 123 acres at the county-owned corporate park, it will employ 466 people, including a range of positions from packers to managers.

"They remembered where they came from, and they remembered their civic obligation," Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at well-attended announcement at the Binghamton University Innovative Technology Center in Vestal.

Since opening as a small bait-and-tackle shop 48 years ago on Court Street, Dick's Sporting Goods has grown into a retailing behemoth — the largest sporting goods retailer in the nation and among the largest vendors of Nike and Under Armour merchandise — with more than 740 stores and $330 million in net income, $7.3 billion in sales and 32 million square feet in total retail space.

Following the ceremony, Dick's CEO Ed Stack reminisced about his father, Dick Stack, saying he would have been overwhelmed by the store's growth and the humbled by the celebratory mood at the Tuesday event.

"I don't think he would have been able to talk," Stack said.

The center, the size of 15 football fields, or about five times the size of the Johnson City Wegmans, will serve about 200 stores from New England, New York and a portion of New Jersey.

"We needed a new distribution center," Stack said, to join the other existing ones in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Indianapolis and Phoenix.

Opening a distribution center in Conklin could serve to slightly ease the sting from the community's loss of the company's operations center and headquarters in 1994. At the time, Dick's had about 70 stores. An 80,000-square-foot distribution center also at the Conklin Corporate Park closed a few years later. Dick's corporate offices now employ about 2,500 people.

Cuomo acknowledged there could have been an emotional pull for Dick's to return to the community in which it was founded, and still remains the home of several family members.

"There's some romanticism," Cuomo said in comments after the announcement. "But decisions are made on the numbers and the facts," and he said the New York package proved alluring to the sporting goods retailer.

While Cuomo alleged the original Dick's move to Pittsburgh was prompted by anti-business attitudes of previous administrations — Cuomo's father, Mario, was governor when Dick's decided to pull out of Binghamton — Stack said taxes played no factor into the relocation equation.

"It was infrastructure," Stack said.

Simply, he said, air service into and out of the local airport caused too many problems for vendors trying to visit the retailer, which could have possibly affected further growth plans. Proximity to a major airport was the primary factor influencing the move to Pittsburgh, which was then a hub for USAirways. Dick's headquarters almost borders the Pittsburgh airport.

Cuomo said the incentive package provided to Dick's was competitive with offers from other sites vying for the facility. New York will provide up to to $12 million in incentives, including funds from the region’s Upstate Revitalization Initiative and Excelsior Jobs Program tax credits. The Broome County Industrial Development Agency is developing a 30-year payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement with Dick's. Additionally, New York State Electric & Gas Corp. is committing up to $540,000 in economic development grant assistance for electric and natural gas infrastructure and energy efficiency improvements.

The Dick's investment represents the second major jobs announcement for Binghamton in the past year. Last August, Modern Marketing Concepts announced it would move from its current site at the Kirkwood Industrial Park to the long-dormant former Link Flight Simulation building less than a quarter-mile away.

MMC plans to invest $17 million into the project, with $5 million from the state, and renovate the 426,000-square-foot building to house a shared corporate space. Modern Marketing plans to double its current employment to about 600 when the project is complete by 2020.

Both economic development projects inject an air of optimism among the region's economic developers, who have been battling a downward slide since the nation's financial collapse in 2008.

Binghamton region employment growth has been lagging behind the state and the nation since the 2008 recession. In the past eight years, Broome and Tioga counties have shed 9,300 jobs, 10 percent of the total, over the past eight years. Meanwhile, jobs across the entire state have been going the opposite way, growing by more than 8 percent over the same period.

While Cuomo touted the region's 4.7 percent unemployment rate on Tuesday, down from a peak of nearly 10 percent, much of the decline is attributable to a dramatic decline in the region's labor force. Binghamton's labor force has dropped by 14,400 since the recession,a decline of 11 percent.

Though current plans call for 650,000 square feet, the site has the potential to be expanded to close to 1 million square-feet depending on future expansion.

Dick's now finds itself sitting atop the sporting goods retailing segment after the bankruptcy of its main competitor, Sports Authority, earlier this year. The company is taking over 31 Sports Authority leases, further expanding its already large national footprint. Dick's stock, traded on the New York Stock Exchange, has gained more than 42 percent since the beginning of the year.

Last year, Dick's announced it would be taking its online sales chain in-house, parting ways with a third-party contractor. Stack said the addition of the Binghamton distribution center was unrelated to that action.

"Binghamton was the perfect place to build this distribution center," Stack said.

The Dick's site is directly across the road from another major distribution center, Maines Paper and Food Service Inc. The site is within a mile to the entrance of Interstate 81, and within miles of Interstate 88 and Route 17, which stretches from the New York City suburbs to the westernmost fringes of New York's Southern Tier.

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