Breaking! St. Tammany Gained 100 New Employment as Building on a $46 Million Cold Storage Facility Begins
DEBARYLIFE – A large $46 million cold storage facility in Pearl River is about to go under construction, creating 100 new employees.
On Tuesday morning, there will be a groundbreaking ceremony for the new Agile Cold Storage building on 10 acres near a cluster of other sizable distribution facilities right off Interstate 59. Representatives from St. Tammany Parish economic development and elected leaders are anticipated to attend.
Agile, a Georgia company, blast-freezes and packages food for delivery. The Pearl River plant will be occupied: When the project was first announced this spring, company representatives stated that they anticipated shipping roughly 100 containers of food each week from the new facility to the Port of New Orleans for export.
Up to a year could pass during construction.
The groundbreaking is set to take place at the Pearl Parkway location at 10:30 a.m.
Leaders in economic development hailed the Agile project’s announcement in March, seeing it as a great fit for their mission to draw additional logistics and distribution firms to St. Tammany. Agile’s location will be close to the Rooms To Go outlet and the distribution center for Associated Wholesale Grocers.
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The parish’s economic development organization, St. Tammany Corporation, estimates that the 100 new positions will pay about $53,000. According to projections made by the state’s economic development department, the facility may generate an additional 100 indirect jobs.
According to a 2022 St. Tammany Corp. report, the transportation, distribution, and logistics industry employed over 8,000 people in the parish in 2022, growing at a pace of 16% between 2017 and 2022.
Meanwhile, the agency has actively promoted the parish as a landing site for logistics and distribution facilities, including many locations along Interstates 12 and 59. To further advance its initiatives, the agency also inked a cooperation arrangement with the Port of New Orleans in 2021.
The company would be reimbursed for site enhancement costs up to a $1.5 million performance-based grant from Louisiana Economic Development, provided the company meets specific payroll and investment goals.
In exchange for the company agreeing to utilize the money for building and other expenses, St. Tammany Parish also provided an incentive that reduces the company’s parish property taxes by around two-thirds for ten years.
According to parish officials, the corporation is anticipated to pay out around $5.4 million in payroll in St. Tammany each year.