The name of the company that will occupy a massive e-commerce distribution facility near the Eugene Airport remains a mystery, but other details of the construction project are becoming clear.

City of Eugene building permit staff are reviewing 38 blueprint/design submittals for the 320,000 square foot building that the architect, BL Companies of Connecticut, filed in January.

Eugene building permits generally are good for 360 days after they are issued, so once BL Companies secures the permits, it does not have to begin construction immediately. The project, on 84 acres of vacant land west of Highway 99, will cost $24.2 million, BL Companies told the city.

BL did not respond to Eugene Weekly emails.

The building is similar in size to Amazon e-commerce regional distribution facilities “sortation centers.” Amazon also did not respond to EW emails. On its website, BL Companies says it has constructed facilities for Amazon.

Amazon sortation centers typically have upwards of 300 workers who use conveyor systems to sort goods for delivery to customers.

Here are more new details:

The land the building would sit on is listed for sale by Eugene Commercial Real Estate for $2,495,000. The land is owned by a group of investors.

Brent McLean, a broker at Eugene Commercial Real Estate, tells the Weekly he can’t say much because he’s signed a non-disclosure agreement with the pending purchaser. He expects the sale to close possibly this fall. The property is zoned for industrial development. It’s about two miles north of the Highway 99/Randy Papé Beltline interchange. There’s been a lot of interest in the property, McLean says. “It’s because of the exposure to the highway,” he says.

The plans show 1,032 parking spaces for delivery vans, plus 408 parking spaces for employees.

The planned building will resemble a vast barn, with storage racks and conveyor belts instead of horse stalls. It’s planned as a single-story building 800 feet long, 400 feet wide and 40 feet high. At one end will be 15 loading-dock doors for semi-trucks, and there are loading doors along the sides, apparently for delivery vans to stock up. 

The building’s innards consist of conveyor belts and sorting stations weaving through a dozen rows of storage shelving. EW would print some of the blueprints, but they’re copyrighted and BL Companies has not given us approval to reproduce them.

The building features a “multifaith” prayer room and two “multifaith ablution” rooms. Ablution is the ritual washing of hands and feet. Amazon has created these rooms at a number of its distribution centers around the country.

The parcel has 36 acres that are government-regulated wetlands. The building’s proposed location seeks to minimize wetlands filling, but some filling would still be needed, the plans show. Typically, in order to fill wetlands, a developer must create a similar amount of wetlands elsewhere, or pay a government-supervised wetlands mitigation project to do that.

Only one building in Lane County is comparable: the True Value hardware distribution center on Olympic Avenue in Springfield. That center, which trucks True Value products to hardware stores around the region, totals more than 500,000 square feet. 

Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.