Nearly 35 years after opening its first Connecticut warehouse club store in Brookfield, Costco wants to build its first New England distribution hub at the other side of the state — creating shorter trip times from its closest distribution center in New Jersey.
Last week, Costco representatives held a public meeting for Plainfield residents on plans for a distribution warehouse that could span 1.1 million square feet of space if approved by the town and officials in Canterbury, with the target property crossing the town line.
The center would serve Costco's New England store base, which totals 18 membership-based stores, all but three of them in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Costco's closest distribution center to New England is located in Monroe Township, New Jersey, about a three-and-a-half hour drive from Plainfield.
The site eyed by Costco is a nearly 440-acre tract between Norwich Road, Butts Bridge Road and Tarbox Road that is screened today with trees, a short distance from Lowe's Way where Lowe's Home Centers has a similar-size warehouse. Lowe's is the town' largest taxpayer with a net assessment of just over $56 million in the most recent year on record.
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Ryan Brais, a town planner with Plainfield, told CT Insider that Costco convened the informational meeting without the town's involvement, and declined comment in advance of any planning documents Costco might file in time.
It would be the latest big development project for Plainfield, on the heels of shipping supplies vendor Uline's planned distribution facility with construction now under way. Smart Technology Systems is also pursuing a waste recycling and incineration plant in Plainfield, which the company says would operate far more cleanly and efficiently than Connecticut's current roster of trash incinerator facilities.
In choosing Plainfield, Costco passed up on possibilities at other points along I-395 corridor like Killingly where a 550-acre site on Westcott Road has been floated as a candidate for a 1.3-million-square-foot warehouse, as well as the Interstate 84 corridor to the north.
New developments there include the East Hartford Logistics & Technology Park, where Lowe's is leasing a newly built warehouse totaling 1.3 million square feet, in addition to the slightly larger facility Lowe's has in Plainfield which opened in 2004.
Wayfair has tabled plans to occupy an adjacent warehouse in East Hartford totaling 1.2 million square feet for its CastleGate in-house logistics and fulfillment operations. Cushman & Wakefield continues to list the entirety of the Wayfair warehouse as available for sublease to other tenants.
Compared to East Hartford, the Plainfield site would require just over 370 miles of extra travel in the aggregate for Costco truck drivers to make round-trip hauls to each of the company's stores in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
Spokespeople for Costco and Wayfair could not be reached immediately Monday on whether Costco explored East Hartford as an alternative site.
"That site currently has a lease with Wayfair and they are working on subleasing the space," said Eileen Buckheit, East Hartford's director of development. "Those efforts are being handled entirely by Wayfair and they have shown the site to several end users, but the names are confidential."
Town approval would be required only if a new user wanted to modify the building or property, Buckheit said.
Lowe's and Wayfair lease space from Massachusetts-based National Development, which owns one more undeveloped parcel in the East Hartford Logistics & Technology Park it is marketing as a potential site for a high-tech manufacturer.
East Hartford has a few advantages to Plainfield, including access to larger numbers of candidate workers. Major nearby warehouse operators include Amazon, JCPenney and Adusa, the grocery distribution affiliate of Stop & Shop, and the Connecticut Department of Labor in the past has staged career fairs at Rentschler Field adjacent to the East Hartford Logistics & Technology Center.
As of August, DOL estimated the unemployment rate for Plainfield residents at 2.8% compared to 5.9% in East Hartford. The difference was negligible in the larger labor markets that include surrounding cities and towns, however, at 3.7% for the Plainfield area to 3.9% in greater Hartford.
Includes prior reporting by Steven Goode and Luther Turmelle, who contributed to this report.
Alexander Soule is a staff writer with Hearst Connecticut Media focused on business, development and the Connecticut economy. Alex is a Maine native who served a two-year enlistment in the U.S. Army before attending Connecticut College. Before joining Hearst Connecticut, Alex started a growth economy website called Enterprise CT chronicling Connecticut startups, with previous work including the Fairfield County Business Journal, the Boston Business Journal, the Rochester Business Journal, Mass High Tech, InsuranceTimes and the MIT Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.