Step aside, Columbia Distributing. There may be a new — and even bigger — game in town.
The Canby Current has learned of a massive new industrial development that is being considered for a 47.54-acre property on land owned by the Weygandt family on Township, Sequoia and Mulino roads.
The property is currently farmland and is zoned for light industrial use. Its immediate neighbors would include American Steel and, eventually, Stanton Furniture, whose 174,000-square-foot manufacturing and distribution facility is still under construction.
According to speculative site plans filed with the City of Canby and obtained by the Current, the project’s developers are proposing a single, mammoth warehouse building designed for e-commerce use and spanning 683,000 square feet — or approximately 150,000 more than Columbia Distributing’s new beverage warehouse and distribution facility located further up Mulino Road.
The proposed warehouse would be 620 feet wide and 1,102 feet long — more than the length of three football fields. The plans for Canby South also include a possible future expansion of 107,000 more square feet.
The project’s team includes developer Trammell Crow Company and architects VMLK Engineering + Design, who have both handled many projects in the Canby industrial park — including Columbia Distributing.
While the Columbia project was designed with its end-user in mind, this may not be the case with Canby South. Its plans repeatedly describe the project as “speculative,” and TCC “continues to recruit potential users,” according to the city.
Developers have invited surrounding property owners to a virtual neighborhood meeting this week to discuss the proposal, which is something the city requires for its industrial users.
The team held a pre-application meeting with city staff in November.
In the works since at least early 2018, Columbia Distributing’s Canby facility was originally shrouded in mystery and known only by the code name “Project Shakespeare.”
Columbia officials later told the Current that both the secrecy and the code name came from the fact that they did not yet know whether the ambitious plans to consolidate three Portland metro area warehouses in Canby would pencil out — hence, the project was “to be, or not to be.”
It wasn’t until months after the project was approved through the city’s planning process that its end-user was made public.
