After several years of uncertainty, the plan to build a $335 million FedEx Ground mega-hub on about 260 acres near Lehigh Valley International Airport is official.
This morning, Lehigh-Northampton Airport Authority and The Rockefeller Group, the New York City developers of the FedEx project, announced the completion of the property sale of the site off Willowbrook Road in Allen Township.
The authority has had an agreement with Rockefeller for the FedEx project since 2012.
Now that the sale is finalized, the money will help the airport tackle capital improvements it had to defer in order to pay off a judgment dating to the 1990s. The airport authority made its final payment on the judgment in January.
“The authority has invested a lot of time into accomplishing this deal, which achieves even stronger financial sustainability for the airport and allows us to make capital improvements around the airfield,” Charles Everett, executive director of the Lehigh-Northampton Airport Authority, said in a statement.
The airport authority, FedEx and Rockefeller hammered out the $9.8 million agreement of sale in February 2015.
Construction is expected to begin this summer with a projected completion and opening of the FedEx facility in 2018.
The facility could produce 800 jobs in the first few years of operation and process as many as 30,000 packages per hour.
FedEx Ground will pay $40 million for road improvements from the site on Willowbrook Road, across Race Street and Airport Road to Route 22.
