Reporting from Troutdale
As conveyer belts shot packages large and small through a massive FedEx sorting facility, members of the Metro Policy Advisory Committee on Wednesday got a feel for what the Portland region gets out of its large industrial lots.
About a dozen MPAC members and community leaders went on a tour of the Port of Portland's Troutdale Reynolds Industrial Park, the site of the Reynolds aluminum plant from 1941 to 2000. The port has been trying to convert the 700-acre Superfund site into a home for jobs in the east part of the region.
And while the port officials hosting the tour talked about the ongoing environmental work under way at the park, one moment of the tour indicated there was a clear message being sent to regional leaders:
"If (FedEx) were to come to us today, in this region, they'd have only once (site) choice, and that would be LSI" said Keith Leavitt, the port's industrial properties manager, referring to a recently-acquired site near Gresham. FedEx uses 78 of the 343 developable acres at Troutdale, and Leavitt said he thinks the facility would have been placed in the Puget Sound region, instead.
The FedEx Portland hub is a little more than half built, covering 447,000 square feet of space just north of the Troutdale Airport. More than 750 people work at the plant, including staff and contractors; it's designed to move 22,500 packages per hour, but exceeds that in December.
Just about every package that FedEx ships by truck into or out of the Pacific Northwest comes through Troutdale.
The plant, said employee Don Croker, will expand "as long as the economy keeps giving us packages."
Conveyer belts and catwalks stuffed the facility, which was immaculately clean. The sheer volume of packages moving through the various automated systems, to and from delivery trucks, gives a breathtaking sense of how much stuff is delivered to homes and businesses in the Pacific Northwest.
The port's interest, though, is to see more stuff delivered from the Portland region. Leavitt said it's part of the port's continuing mission to maintain a supply of industrial land for employers to set up on.
The tour underscored how difficult that mission can be.
Just because the site used to be a huge factory doesn't mean the keys can be turned over to employers, and the port faces several barriers to getting the park's other 11 vacant parcels ready for the turning of dirt.
A gas pipeline passes under the industrial park, and power lines crisscross it above. The access roads' proximity to the airport limits where trucks can drive, and the levees that keep the area from flooding in wet winters also prevent construction in many areas. Some parts of the industrial park will never be developed because of contamination from the aluminum plant.
A lot of Metro's planning efforts in the last two years have been focused on converting brownfields into viable industrial parks. With elected officials reluctant to give industrial developers carte blanche to pave over farmland around the region for factories, the port and business advocacy groups have been pushing more awareness of brownfield cleanup around the region.
With the next largest lot available at the Troutdale park at 38 acres, it's unlikely anything on the scale of FedEx will be built at the industrial area. One site just east of the FedEx facility is proposed for a $850 million natural gas power plant, which would both help sell baseline power to the Portland region and run backup duty when there isn't enough wind to push the turbines in the Columbia River Gorge.
"The tour reinforced how challenging it is to reuse land that has been polluted," said Metro Councilor Shirley Craddick, whose district includes Troutdale. "In this situation, only an agency like the port, that has the financial acumen and funds available, can take on a site like the old Reynolds Aluminum."
She said it would be good if the region had some sort of fund to help with brownfield conversion.
"We need to all we can do to use the land we have inside the UGB before we venture out further," she said.
MPAC is scheduled to go on one more tour this summer, visiting downtown Oregon City on July 11. The committee is set to discuss its thoughts on the Troutdale tour at its June 27 meeting.