Western Distribution Services, LLC has opened a 241,140 square-foot cold storage facility in the Northeast Redevelopment Area (NERA) in Burien.
The Seattle Southside Chamber of Commerce, the local business community and elected officials from across the region on Friday celebrated the opening with a ribbon cutting. It was the first milestone in private sector investment in NERA, an industrial-zoned segment of land adjacent to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Bridge Development Partners, LLC, a Chicago-based industrial and office developer purchased the 14-acre site late last year. They saw the potential value Western Distribution Services, LLC, a Renton-based logistics, cold storage, warehouse provider will operate the logistics of the facility. Kidder Mathews commercial real estate brokers Dan Mathews and Mike Newton represented both parties for this project.
“The results of this ten-year planning effort are the first steps toward making the city of Burien’s and Port of Seattle’s visions a reality. I recognized the synergies between the goals of the public and private sectors, and collaborated with all parties to assemble the land and bring suitable developers and end user options,” Mathews said in a media release. “This project will spur economic development to support families in the region for years to come.”
NERA was created in 1997 as an area impacted by current and future aviation activities at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The city of Burien, in partnership with the Port of Seattle, determined how to respond to regional market and economic realities while adapting to physical and environmental development capacities. The shared goal was to realize the vision for the area as a sustainable airport-compatible redevelopment.
The Port of Seattle’s Century Agenda was initiated in 2012 and aims to add 100,000 jobs through economic growth over the next 25 years, while reducing its environmental footprint. The NERA properties represent a significant opportunity in reaching that goal through partnerships between the public and private sectors. With limited land available for new industrial facilities north of Kent, the NERA, and this new project specifically, offer a benchmark addition to the distribution and warehousing space necessary to support the Century Agenda.
“New cold storage facilities are needed to meet stringent code regulations for food safety, storage, and transportation,” Western Distribution Services President John Naylor said in the release. “I believe in the port’s Century Agenda and the benefit of the Burien site’s proximity to the airport and critical shipping routes. This new facility has created a new cold storage, and warehousing campus to serve the growing needs of an increasingly regulated and growing retail food services sector; along with the imports and exports of seafood and other foods.”
