The Planning Commission on Monday approved Stanton Furniture’s request to build a new 174,000-square-foot manufacturing and distribution facility in the Canby industrial park.
The facility will become the new home base of the company as they relocate their approximately 300 employees and the entirety of their operations, currently based in Tualatin.
As Jason Sahlin, principal for the Portland-based firm VLMK Engineering + Design, explained during the public hearing, the jobs are a big deal.
Stanton would immediately become one of the city’s largest private employers — rivaling even their new neighbor, Columbia Distributing, who also anticipate housing around 300 employees, but in a facility that’s three times larger.
(“The business is obviously bringing a lot of jobs to Canby,” Sahlin said. “The opportunity for growth, which I assume is the reason you initially created the industrial park, is one of the things you want to have in these kinds of developments.”)
The project site is located between Sequoia Parkway and South Mulino Road, with access to SE 4th Ave. to the north, a road that is currently unfinished. The developers will be expected to provide half street improvements to city standards along 4th Ave and Mulino Road.
The facility will be mostly warehouse space — 160,885 square feet of it — along with about 6,500 square feet of office space and 6,500 square feet of storage. The project would also include employee parking, 36 loading docks (most of them along Mulino Road) and a yard area, as well as required landscaping.
The company proposes to split their employees between two shifts, one that starts at about 5:30 a.m. and runs through 3, and one that starts at 3 p.m. and runs through midnight.
Trafficwise, the project is expected to generate an estimated 460 new daily trips, approximately 64 of them during the peak a.m. rush hour and 69 during the peak p.m. rush hour.
The vast majority of that would be employee traffic, not trucks, according to a company representative, who estimated the facility would receive only about three trucks a day, with eight to 10 outbound.
Some residents questioned those numbers during the public comment period, wondering why a facility would need 36 bays to load or unload only 10 to 12 trucks a day. As ever, traffic and the condition of local roads is a major concern for many residents, including Planning Commission Chair John Savory.
(“My biggest concern with the last few projects has been traffic,” Savory said. “I think traffic is horrible now. I think adding the new truck traffic and people using 99 to get to Stanton, Caruso and Columbia Distributing… Somebody’s going to come along and say, ‘This is unbearable.'”)
Chair Savory, however, also stated that he was in favor of this project as presented, and he voted to approve it, joined by four colleagues.
Commissioner Jason Taylor was the lone dissenter. Commissioner Jennifer Trundy was absent.
Stanton is a family-owned and -operated furniture manufacturer known for their high-quality sofas, recliners and other home furnishings, which are designed with unique features to add comfort, durability and customer satisfaction, and come with a lifetime guarantee.
Over the past 40 years, Stanton has manufactured more upholstered furniture than any other company based in the Pacific Northwest.
In their initial application, the company anticipated they would start construction in the spring and complete the project by next February.
