The Roanoke City Council on Monday signed off on two actions related to the e-commerce giant Amazon’s ongoing negotiations to buy a Deschutes Brewery-owned property in Roanoke.
Since the first quarter of this year, Amazon has been in talks with the brewery to buy a 49-acre piece of land in the Roanoke Centre for Industry and Technology with an eye toward constructing and operating a 125,000-square-foot distribution center for preparing and shipping customer orders.
Bend, Oregon-based Deschutes bought the land in 2018 for $3.2 million, but the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors stopped its plan to build an East Coast facility there.
When Deschutes was still planning to build on the site, the city of Roanoke entered into an agreement with the U.S. Economic Development Administration for the federal agency to pay half the cost of a $3 million project to extend Blue Hills Drive Northeast in the industrial park.
That agreement restricted the property to manufacturing use. If Amazon buys the property, the EDA will be repaid from the proceeds of the sale, removing that restriction, according to a plan outlined in public documents and presented to the council on Monday.
The council’s vote Monday was to amend the language of the property’s deed accordingly and to allow city officials to establish an escrow account for transferring money from the possible real estate sale to the EDA. The vote was unanimous in favor.
No public money would be used to repay the EDA because Amazon and Deschutes have incorporated the cost of the repayment into their negotiations, emphasized Marc Nelson, Roanoke’s director of economic development.
“This was an ideal location for them because it’s close to the interstate, it is centrally located and the site is large enough to be able to house what they wanted to do on it,” Nelson told city council members when asked why Amazon is considering the Roanoke location.
