Many in Essex learned this week that Amazon is proposing to build a warehouse in town.
Over 80 people packed into a meeting in the town office Thursday night to discuss the proposed facility, which would sit about five miles from Interstate 89 and within a mile of the Winooski River.
This would be the first Amazon facility in the state, with workers sorting items and making deliveries within roughly 70 miles, according to developers. The warehouse would cover an area of about two football fields, next to almost 500 parking spaces.
“This investment is designed to benefit our customers in the state, of which we have many,” Jonathon Greeley, Amazon’s head of economic development for New England, told the Essex Development Review Board.
“Today, everything that’s delivered to you by Amazon is third-party,” he said, referencing the U.S. Postal Service and UPS. “Our goal here with this facility is to be a single-threaded owner of that entire process.”
His team said the project would result in traffic from one or two tractor-trailers an hour overnight — from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. — plus daytime traffic from employees, including an estimated 150 delivery van drivers at a time.
Nearly everyone who spoke expressed concerns about the proposal, including the traffic, working conditions at Amazon facilities, the environmental impact of the project, and the long-term commitment of Amazon to the area, which earlier this year announced it would shutter seven sorting and shipping facilities in Quebec shortly after employees at one of the facilities formed a union.
“This community and this state will oppose you, however possible, at every single turn,” Jenna Danyew, whose home would neighbor the facility, told Amazon representatives at the end of the meeting.
“You may not be worried about 50 people in this room, but we will get bigger, and we will get louder, and we will not allow this to happen.”
Other residents, like Pam Schirner, said they previously supported development of the road and the industrial park.
“My naivety was that we were putting a local business up in that development,” said Schirner, who lives on the same road as the proposed facility.
“It never even crossed my mind that Amazon would be up there.”
She said she didn't understand how the proposed increase in traffic would be permissible by the town.
Development review board members said they would vote on the application at a later date, yet to be announced.
And they repeatedly said their role is to see whether an application follows the town's existing rules and regulations, "not whether or not we like them," said board member Dustin Bruso.
"If we see something we don't like," Bruso said, "we have to change the regulations."
