FedEx Plans to Pump $170M Into Indy Hub

FedEx opened its Indianapolis hub in 1988.

FedEx Corp. (NYSE: FDX) is planning a $170 million investment in its hub at Indianapolis International Airport. In a tax abatement request introduced Monday evening to the City-County Council in Indianapolis, the company says plans call for more than two dozen additional full-time and nearly 180 part-time positions. FedEx says the installation of new package-handling equipment would also help retain some 730 full-timers and 3,200 part-timers.

The work is expected to be spread between 2017 and 2020. FedEx located to the airport property in the late 1980s.

In 2006, the company and the Indianapolis International Airport Authority announced a $214 million expansion of the hub, adding hundreds of jobs in the process and, at the time, expanding its lease at the property to 2028. That announcement came just two years before the ribbon was cut on the $1.1 billion Colonel H. Weir Cook Terminal, the main commercial air facility, just west of the old terminal.

The FedEx hub is the global company’s second-largest next to its home base in Memphis, Tennessee.

The new plan will now head to the council’s Metropolitan & Economic Development Committee Monday for a vote to recommend it to the full council. The earliest the full council could approve it would be September 26, before it would go October 5 to the Metropolitan Development Commission for final approval.