Gary mayor announces $60 million FedEx facility
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A Gary property developer who recently bought a piece of prime industrial land from the city says FedEx will use the site for a major distribution facility.
The Memphis-based shipping giant will operate out of the 317,000 square-foot building next door to Gary/Chicago International Airport starting April 2027.
Gary Mayor Eddie Melton announced the project this week in his State of the City address, saying FedEx will lease the site and bring in about 600 new jobs—of which 20% will be Gary residents.
“Why shouldn’t Gary be a logistics hub, not of Indiana but of North America? Because we have the infrastructure,” Melton said in his remarks.
The total building cost is estimated at around $60 million.
Melton added 20% of contracting work will go to minority-owned businesses and 5% to women-owned business. Construction is slated to start later this month, the mayor said.
“This is not ‘possibly,’ ladies and gentlemen. This is happening right now,” Melton told audience members.
A FedEx spokesperson declined an interview request from Inside INdiana Business. The spokesperson said in an email the facility will have the capacity to sort 15,000 packages per hour and that “The site was chosen because of its ease of access to major highways, proximity to customers’ distribution centers and a strong local community workforce for recruiting employees.”
The city owned the approximately 78 acres until earlier this month when the redevelopment commission agreed to sell the land to SP TP Gary Development LLC for $4.7 million. SP TP is affiliated with Rosemont, Illinois-based Transport Properties, according to our reporting partners at the Times of Northwest Indiana.
At the time of the purchase, SP TP said it planned to invest around $40 million towards building a warehouse facility on the land. That investment number has increase with the FedEx announcement.
The site at 6200 Industrial Highway is directly across from the airport and less than five minutes from Interstate-90 and U.S. Highway 12.