Amazon plans new fulfillment center
Neighbors in the area are concerned about the trucks, traffic from more than a thousand potential employees at the center
Amazon, the e-commerce giant, now wants to install one of its massive fulfillment centers in western Sunrise — adding to a burgeoning lineup of sites across South Florida to speed up service to thousands of customers.
The fulfillment center, which would employ 1,000 full-time staffers, would be Amazon’s fourth in South Florida and will service orders from cities across the country, Amazon said Tuesday.
The first opened in Opa-locka in 2019 in northern Miami Dade County. Two others are under construction in Homestead and western Palm Beach County. When all is said and done, South Florida could become one of the most heavily concentrated areas of e-commerce delivery and fulfillment sites in the state.
But many neighbors aren’t happy. The Sunrise site is a vacant, hard-scrabble stretch of unoccupied land west of Hiatus Road, south of 50th Street and north of 44th Street, but it’s adjacent to several neighborhoods that could see increased truck traffic as well as more cars driven by Amazon employees going to and from work.
Last Thursday, Amazon and developer Foundry Commercial of Orlando conducted one of several neighborhood meetings held since January to explain the project. Many of the more than 100 people who attended online and in person weren’t happy about its size and the prospects for more traffic in an area that’s not far from the Sawgrass Mills mall and the BB&T Center, home of the Florida Panthers professional hockey team.
Persuading the neighbors
Company representatives stressed that trucks would be allowed to enter and exit the property only on the north side of the building off 50th Street. They would not be allowed to travel on residential intensive 44th Street on the south, or along Hiatus to the east.
“All of the trucks would come in and out of 50th Street,” said Dennis Mele, partner and chair of the land use and zoning group at the Greenspoon Marder law firm, which represents Amazon.
Under an agreement between Amazon and the city, truckers who go astray would be identified by strategically placed cameras and would be ticketed if they travel on a forbidden street.
“If the trucker gets the ticket, he’ll have to pay,” Mele said.
The fulfillment centers are larger and different than smaller “last-mile” delivery centers that occupy other South Florida neighborhoods. They’re heavily automated and house large inventories of electronics, household goods, books, toys and other products the company’s customers order online.
Only bigger trucks that deliver goods to and from the facility would operate at the Sunrise center. The ubiquitous gray Amazon vans that deliver products to homes operate out of the smaller “last-mile” delivery stations that are located elsewhere.
The company also said it would erect berms and install trees and other landscaping that would obscure the view of the building from surrounding neighborhoods. Outdoor lighting would be positioned so it would not shine outside the Amazon property.
“We are certainly committed to be good neighbors,” said Jessica Breaux,
an Amazon manager of economic development. She said the company recently made combined donations of $500,000 to the United Ways of Broward and Miami-Dade counties.
As a result of public meetings in January, Amazon said in response to a list of emailed questions from the South Florida Sun Sentinel that it’s made a number of changes to the project’s original plan. They include:
Moving the building 175 feet farther away from neighborhoods.
Mitigating traffic and speed on 44th Street, including lighted crosswalks and speed plaques.
Increasing landscaping to include a 20-foot-tall berm and sound wall, a 38-acre lake, a linear park and a wetland mitigation area.
Restricting truck routes to keep traffic away from residential neighbors.
Scheduling staff shifts to avoid school drop-off/ pick-up and peak traffic hours.
But during last week’s meeting, one questioner asked why Amazon had to pick Sunrise and the property it now covets for the fulfillment center.
How many 128-acre industrial sites are there? Mele replied.
“There are many contributing factors that go into our thought process for identifying new fulfillment and delivery station locations,” Amazon said. “South Florida has a workforce with an abundance of talent. We’re also responding to customer demand, placing our fulfillment centers close to customers so we can offer great Prime service and fast shipping speeds.”
Previously, Amazon had sought to place a center on 61 acres of county-owned land near U.S. 27 and Sheridan Street near Pembroke Pines, but lost the property to another company. Amazon said, however, that the Sunrise site is not an alternate to the county-owned acreage.
Foundry Commercial, which built Amazon’s 800,000-square-foot Opa-locka center in MiamiDade, is expected to take 16 to 18 months to erect the center after the city were to grant its approvals. The completion date would likely land in the third or fourth quarter of 2022, an Amazon official said.
Potential job market lift
Breaux added that the company would seek to ensure job opportunities are made available to Sunrise residents, and would work closely with the city to make that happen.
In an interview Tuesday, David Coddington, senior vice president of business development for the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance, said the center could help re-employ Broward County workers laid off in a leisure and hospitality industry hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. The county’s latest published jobless rate was 6.6% in December; Palm Beach County’s was 5.5%.
Coddington estimated the combined Amazon locations could end up employing upward of 5,000 people around the tri-county area.
“It’s a project of ours and we are helping to work with Amazon to help get this established,” he said of the planned Sunrise center. “We want to make sure that as they move this forward ... they will be able to employ those people.”
Building more
The online retailer’s expansion across Broward and Palm Beach counties now includes:
A distribution center opened in Boca Raton in late 2020.
A one-million-squarefoot facility under construction — the size of the Palm Beach Gardens mall — in an unincorporated part of Palm Beach County west of Jupiter.
The conversion of two warehouses in western Pompano Beach into a delivery station to more quickly get retail goods to customers.
Amazon’s development application for Sunrise has yet to be formally reviewed by the city, which posted several videos on its website of neighborhood meetings held in January and on Feb. 11.
Hearing dates have yet to be scheduled with the city.