Officials on Wednesday welcomed the new Amazon distribution center in northwest Oakley, which is expected to open in several weeks and become the largest job hub in the city.
“With 800 jobs, Amazon steps right away into the top spot, to be the largest employer in Oakley ahead of the Oakley Union Elementary School District,” Mayor Kevin Romick said at a ribbon cutting ceremony. “Amazon also may be exploring other sites sometime in the near future.”
During the event, scaled back because of COVID-19 restrictions, workers could be seen putting finishing touches on the nearly completed fulfillment center and another unoccupied building next door. Amazon representatives have said the center will include full- and part-time jobs that pay a minimum of $15 per hour and offer a variety of benefits packages. Oakley-specific job openings have yet to be announced, and prospective employees are encouraged to apply online.
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“We are excited to be investing in the city of Oakley with a new delivery station to provide efficient delivery for customers and providing hundreds of job opportunities for the talented local workforce,” said Amazon representative Eileen Hards.
The mayor called the center a major economic development engine for East Contra Costa County for years to come.
“Today is a very special day in our relatively young city. Just over nine months ago we were here with North Point Development with shovels in our hands breaking ground on this facility and to transform this community into one with significant employment opportunities,” Romick said. “… We truly appreciate Amazon in their confidence of their site selection and their investment in our community, and we look forward to a growing relationship.”
The Amazon fulfillment center will occupy the first of five buildings — a 150,000-square‐foot structure — within the massive Contra Costa Logistics Center at 6000 Bridgehead Road. It will be the smallest of five buildings at the site, with the largest planned at more than 642,000 square feet. Long tapped for the site of a light industrial/business park, the former DuPont chemical plant that employed some 600 workers at its peak was shuttered in 1998 after 32 years of operation.
“Today is awesome, very exciting,” Romick said. “Today is hopefully the start of so much more to come,” adding that the city would like to to attract ancillary-type businesses to the area. “Hopefully, it will be 2,500 to 3,000 jobs when it’s all said and done,” he said.
The 2-million-square-foot Logistics Center is expected to house light industrial and logistics-type businesses, providing nearly 2,000 jobs at buildout in four years. Though Oakley offers some of the most affordable housing in the Bay Area, Romick admitted there’s a significant jobs-to-housing imbalance, making Amazon’s new center a particularly welcome addition. Oakley City Manager Bryan Montgomery said persistence and hard work put the city in position to land a large employer such as Amazon.
“The goal being to keep our residents working and buying closer to home,” he said. “Having Amazon locate a fulfillment facility at our Logistics Center is a tremendous step forward in achieving this goal.”
The complex is also expected to generate about $500,000 in taxes for the city, officials said. Joel Schrenk, a project manager for Kansas City‐based NorthPoint Development, which is building the industrial business park, called the new Amazon center a “last-mile facility.” He said products will come in, be sorted and boxed and then moved out for delivery.
“They have these types of facilities all over the country for rapid deployment to meet the public’s demand for same-day and even less-than-a-day delivery service,” he said. “The product doesn’t stay in the building for more than 24 hours.”
Schrenk also showed off a nearly completed warehouse, larger than the Amazon site next door. He said he hopes to announce the tenant shortly.
“We have a lot of active prospects on this but no lease signed yet,” he said, noting that a large pet food company and home improvement store are possibilities.
With so many potential jobs on the horizon, the mayor said Oakley is “fast becoming the place to be.”
“We have drawn the spotlight to East Contra Costa and to Oakley in particular,” he said. “Instead of being an outlier, with more buildings and tenants on their way, Oakley is now the epicenter of economic development in East Contra Costa County.”
For more on Amazon jobs, go to https://bit.ly/3hJlVr9.
