Amazon’s Sussex plans likely up for vote in August

Officials in the village of Sussex are planning to weigh in soon on the online retailer Amazon‘s plans to expand a local distribution center.

Sussex Village Administrator Jerry Smith said Amazon officials two months ago began discussing plans to add on to the 114,000-square-foot fulfillment center they now operate in the village, which is northwest of Milwaukee in Waukesha County. Detailed plans could go before the village’s plan commission as early as August, he said.

Amazon has proposed taking over all of an existing warehouse it now shares with another company at N53 W24700 S. Corporate Circle in Sussex. The expansion would give Amazon about 190,000 square feet of space in the village. Amazon announced in early 2018 that its sorting center would be a place where it could process orders before shipping them to customers.

Smith said the retailer is expanding because a company that had occupied an adjacent space in the warehouse is leaving, allowing Amazon to take over the whole building.

“We’re just in the right geographic location to suit their needs,” Smith said.

Smith said the expansion plans don’t specify whether Amazon will employ more people in its larger space. Amazon, for its part, has said it will employ more than 350 people in Sussex.

Amazon’s latest expansion comes as work continues on a 2.6 million-square-foot, four-story fulfillment center in Oak Creek. The company has said it will employ 1,500 people there.

Besides the Oak Creek project, Amazon has two distribution centers in Kenosha that have 1.5 million square feet of space in total.

Sussex hasn’t provided tax incentives for Amazon’s sorting center in the village, Smith said; nor are development incentives being offered in return for the latest expansion plans. Amazon, though, has obtained state and local tax breaks for its developments in Kenosha and Oak Creek.  For the $100 million distribution center in Oak Creek, for instance, the company stands to receive as much as $7.5 million from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.

Smith said Sussex officials are likely in August to weigh in on the retailer’s plans, which also call for an expansion of a parking lot. The Sussex Plan Commission could decide at its meeting either to approve the plans then or instead send them to the full village board for further review. Follow @natebeck9