Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced Tuesday that it will build an 860,000-square-foot food distribution center in the Box Elder County town of Corinne.
Construction of the mammoth center on U-83 west of Brigham City will begin this summer, with completion scheduled for summer 2000.According to a press release, mega-retailer Wal-Mart will hire about 200 people in spring 2000 as initial employees for the center. Total jobs should hit 400 within five years. More than 90 percent of the jobs created will be full-time positions with benefits.
"Wal-Mart looks forward to developing our role as a vital and integral part of (Corinne and Brigham City) and a partner in economic development and growth in the state of Utah," said Mike Duke, Wal-Mart's senior vice president of logistics, in a press release.
Len Woolley, executive director of Box Elder County Economic Development, said the center will distribute dry, frozen and refrigerated foods to Wal-Mart superstores in Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, Idaho, Arizona and Colorado.
"We happen to be dead-center of their new service area," Woolley said. "Also, we had relatively inexpensive land, and we also have access to I-84 and I-15."
Woolley said Wal-Mart, which bought 137 acres of private land for the center, has been looking at sites in Box Elder County for more than a year. Some tax increment financing from the county should help the company make needed water and sewer infrastructure improvements, he said, and the center may eventually be annexed into Corinne, a town of about 650 people.
Woolley said 250 to 500 trucks will move in and out of the center during one of its 20-hour work days. And although the only tax revenue it will provide is property tax, Woolley said he thinks the center will eventually have a large, positive economic impact on the area.
"The benefit is going to be mostly in the peripheral businesses," he said. "Because of the nature of their business, they will need food service for the people who work there, . . . plus trucking and gas services."
David B. Winder, executive director of the Utah Department of Community and Economic Development, said the distribution center is great news for Box Elder County.
"It will be distributing a lot of (products) out-of-state, so we've got jobs created that are performing services for people in other states, which brings a net gain of wealth to Utah and to Box Elder County," Winder said. "There are a lot of attractive things about this."
Both Winder and Woolley said finding employees for the center should not be a problem.
"We've worked with (the Department of) Workforce Services and discovered that between Cache and Box Elder counties and southern Idaho, we could easily pull 1,000 people to be employed there," Woolley said. "And Corinne is close to the Weber side, so we can pull from Weber County, too."
Wal-Mart currently employs about 425 people at a distribution center in Hurricane, Washington County. The company has 14 stores and 4,735 employees in Utah and more than 2,300 stores and 440 Sam's Club membership warehouses in the United States.