QUESTION: What’s being built near the NC 119 bypass where it goes over U.S. 70 in Mebane?
ANSWER: There are two construction projects in the vicinity identified by the questioner, on both sides of the existing Cambro Manufacturing plant off of West Holt Street.
The far larger of the two is an expansion, actually a second facility, for Cambro. The second is the transload facility, to provide rail access for local industries.
Cambro held a ceremonial groundbreaking last June, announcing that the current plant built in 2015 (now occupying 476,857 square feet) would be supplemented by a second, 379,672-square foot warehouse facility that would nearly double the company’s footprint within the North Carolina Industrial Center in Mebane.
Completion of a second facility for Cambro would bring the company’s total square footage in Mebane to a total of 856,529 square feet, based on the plans that have been filed with the city by Greensboro-based Triad Design Group.
The current Mebane facility is the Huntington Beach, California-based company’s only East Coast manufacturing plant.
The new facility is being built by Samet Corporation and is targeted to open in the fall of 2025, Cambro director of logistics Michael Ortiz had previously told The Alamance News last year.
The new plant will be equipped with 56 dock doors and two drive-in doors; Cambro expects to add up to 60 additional employees to the more than 100 who now work for the company at its Mebane location, the company said last year. Alex Talamantes is the company’s plant manager.
Cambro describes itself as a family-owned manufacturing company that produces more than 17,000 products used in the food and beverage industry.
The new facility is being built on 25.4 acres along N.C. Highway 119, near the intersection with West Holt Street. The existing site (at 1268 Holt Street) and the Cambro site under construction are both on Holt Street and are straddled by an overhead bypass for NC 119.
Cambro’s existing facility is located near a planned “transload facility” and a rail loop that Samet hopes to establish on four acres at the corner of West Holt Street and Lake Latham Road in Mebane to serve the North Carolina Industrial Center (NCIC). That is the second construction site to which the questioner apparently refers.
“The current location is a combined facility of both manufacturing and logistics,” Ortiz outlined in an interview with the newspaper last summer. “We are expanding on the manufacturing side, which means we need more room. [Cambro CEO and president] Argyle Campbell owns that land, so that is the property we’re going to [expand on]. The new building is going to be used for 100 percent storage.”
Cambro’s parent company, A Campbell Holdings of Huntington Beach, California, purchased the 25.4-acre property, now targeted for the expansion, for approximately $1.3 million in January 2020, based on documents on file with Alamance County’s Register of Deeds.
The proposed 379,672-square-foot second facility would be built on 14 acres within the overall site, based on based on preliminary plans that have been developed for the Cambro expansion. The facility would be surrounded on three sides by a 40-foot buffer with opaque fencing ranging between four and eight feet high that would be built on top of retaining walls.
Shrubs and trees would be planted along the eastern side of the property to provide a vegetative buffer between the manufacturing facility and approximately half a dozen adjacent residential properties, the plans show. Any existing vegetation also will remain in place, according to the plans that Triad Design Group has submitted to the city for the Cambro expansion. The site plans show that a 26-foot wide gravel access road for emergency vehicles also would be built along one edge of the property.
The existing facility is located near the rail line, but the new facility will not be, Ortiz told the newspaper.
Transload rail facility
The promise of a future rail spur beside Cambro’s plant was one of the things that lured the company to decide to build in Mebane 10 years ago.
Alamance County’s commissioners agreed in 2023 to provide $300,843 for the transload facility that had been planned for nearly a decade but only became viable when the North Carolina General Assembly earmarked $2.6 million for a new transload facility in the biennial state budget passed in late 2021.
The latest estimated cost to build the transload facility was $3.2 million as of early 2023, prompting Alamance County chamber officials to seek additional funding from the city of Mebane and Alamance County government to cover the construction costs.
David Putnam, then the economic development director for the Alamance County Area Chamber of Commerce, told the county commissioners in the spring of 2023 that the transload facility “would open up opportunities for manufacturers, farmers, everybody” to have direct rail access to ship and receive rail cargo.