SPANISH FORK — When national catalog powerhouse Fingerhut chose Spanish Fork as the site of a massive new distribution center in the mid-1990s, it also brought the promise of hundreds of jobs in a building with 1.04 million square feet.
But Fingerhut's market went into a slump shortly after completion of the building in 1995, and the monstrous plant — it's as big as 24 football fields — never opened.
Now both state and local economic development chiefs express optimism for new job growth within the once-abandoned building that sits on 163 acres at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon.
Banta Marketing Distribution Center was first to lease space — a relatively tiny 30,000 square feet — in the monolith. Banta employs 18 full-time workers and uses 30 temporary workers daily, said Scott Syme, operations manager.
The newest tenant distributes products for JC Penney. Some 400 workers at USCO Logistics prepare and ship orders from the building to 46 JC Penney stores in the Western United States, said Monty Montierth, commercial real estate agent for Transwestern Commercial Services. Some of the jobs are seasonal.
Clothing orders ship from the structure — now dubbed Western Distribution Center — ready to hang on racks, he said.
"It's definitely going to help the economic vitality of the community," Spanish Fork City Manager Dave Oyler said of the new interest in the structure.
Transwestern, a Salt Lake commercial real estate firm, brokered the sale of the building to Tennessee buyers under the name Spanish Fork Properties after Federated Department Stores acquired Fingerhut in March 1999. It then helped bring in USCO and contracted to lease the nearly 400,000 square feet that remain.
Hundreds of additional jobs are possible once the building is fully occupied, said Russ Fotheringham, director of the Utah Valley Economic Development Agency.
"If we can fully utilize it, we will have lots of jobs," Fotheringham said.
Fingerhut expected to hire more than 520 employees within two years of opening in July 1995, then expand to as many as 800 workers when the operation was in full swing. The building was expected to generate approximately $10.4 million in new wages yearly for Spanish Fork and surrounding areas, according to a mid-1990s analysis.
If that happens now, it will be with a mix of companies.
The city spent $220,000 to straighten Powerhouse Road for the nearly 60 trucks expected to enter and exit the facility each day under Fingerhut, which planned to service 16 Western states, including Alaska and Hawaii.
Fingerhut had plans to build another 500,000 square feet of commercial space on the site, Fotheringham said. The center is at the end of a long, curved street off Powerhouse Road not far from homes to the north and in the foothills to the west. A restaurant and the city golf course are also nearby.
Jeff Edwards, vice president of the Economic Development Corporation of Utah, sees the potential for several hundred more jobs at the Spanish Fork distribution center, depending on how automated future tenants are.
The non-profit economic development corporation, which is both privately and publicly funded, works to bring companies into Utah and help companies already here to stay.
"This is a very good size for a distribution facility," he said. "It's what we call in the industry 'plug-and-play.' "
The building is unusual for Utah because of the huge square footage that's ready to go with features such as a super-flat floor, important for automated equipment.
There's flat and then there's super-flat, Montierth said. A super-flat floor has no waves or variations in it that would hamper the operation of automated equipment. This floor has a wire buried in it that unmanned forklifts can follow. An automated forklift can pick an object off a shelf high above the floor within a fraction of an inch, he said.
E-MAIL: rodger@desnews.com