SALT LAKE CITY – State economic officials say it’s a very big deal.
Online retail giant, Amazon, has committed to building a new “fulfillment center” in Utah. Governor’s Office of Economic Development Executive Director Val Hale says the company is committed to investing $200 million to build it. Hale says, “This will be about an 800 thousand square foot facility. They usually have millions of items in there.”
Governor Gary Herbert and Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski took trips to woo Amazon administrators to Utah. Hale says he was greatly impressed with the operation when he traveled to Washington to see one of these centers. “They can find three different items out of 16 million items and within 20 minutes, they can have those items pulled off shelves, into a cart and ready to ship,” he says.
Competition to get this new facility was reportedly fierce. Hale says governors from other states were also in Washington, trying to convince the company to expand there. In the end, Hale says Amazon was offered a 20 percent post-performance tax credit over eight years.
Hale says, “Once they prove that they have generated the revenue they said they would generate, and we go back and verify that through an audit, then, we give them back 20 percent of that new state revenue they’ve created.”
He adds that incentives offered by Utah were not as rich as what was being offered from other states.
The exact location, and the timeline for when construction would begin, were not revealed.
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