Shovel-ready industrial site could lure high-tech business

COLUMBIA — City officials and representatives of Regional Economic Development Inc. are excited about the potential for a new "shovel-ready" industrial site to attract a data center or other high-tech business to the area.

Click here to see the area that constitutes the industrial site.

Shovel-ready sites are critical to the city’s efforts to attract industry, said Chad Sayre of Allstate Consultants. Allstate represented Grindstone Investments when it asked the Columbia City Council to annex and zone 192-acres northeast of the city as an addition to Ewing Industrial Park. The council unanimously approved that request on April 4, zoning 77 acres of the property for controlled industrial use and applying agricultural zoning to the rest of the property as a “holding” classification.

About 112 acres of the property — the 77 acres zoned for industrial use and another 35 acres to the west — has been designated by the state as a Missouri certified industrial site. It was the first site to receive that designation.

The land already is served by city electricity, fiber optics, water, telecommunications and transportation infrastructure. Now that it has industrial zoning, city planner Patrick Zenner said it should prove attractive to business and industry.

"The purpose is to present potential prospects with a parcel of land that has met with environment diligence standards and overcome zoning issues to make it more readily developable quicker," Zenner said. "That's one of the key components to finding an industrial user."

Grindstone Investments and representatives of REDI have been marketing the property. They say they think several factors make it a good location for a data center.

Data centers are protected warehouses containing computer servers that hold large amounts of data for independent companies who don't have the storage space to keep all their information on site. Data centers need a steady supply of affordable electricity, water and sewer services, access to fiber optics and a telecommunications infrastructure.

REDI Executive Vice President Bernie Andrews said the company has stayed in "close contact" with Grindstone Investments to ensure the property is used to its best potential.

"We have a very good site because of the potential redundancy of electric service and proximity to water," Andrews said.

Ewing Industrial Park is a high-electricity area with existing fiber optic lines for carrying data. Linda Rootes, a rate analyst for the Columbia Water and Light Department, said industrial customers with the best load factors are paying an average of 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour, while data centers on the East and West coasts pay up to 11 cents to 12 cents per kilowatt hour. Load factors are a calculation of the consistency a customer’s electrical demand. Rootes said a data center would have a relatively good load factor because its servers would run constantly.

Although data centers never close, they require few employees. Sayre said preliminary discussions have revolved around the idea of a 100,000-square-foot building that would bring 15 to 30 jobs. Every subsequent phase of a data center would add about the same number of jobs. Sayre said some data centers have gone through as many as seven phases of construction.

Zenner said a data center — or any industrial use of the property — could bring “spin-off” developments such as call centers or on-site telephone co-ops. He said recycling issues could arise from the data center’s post-usage bio-waste. Hot water and other nontoxic by-products that emanate from the data center could speed up the generation of methane gas at the city landfill adjacent to the property.

“One potential spin-off economic engine generated there could be methane packaging, filling up tanks and taking them to use somewhere else,” Zenner said.

Randy Adams of Grindstone Investments said the property is still on the market for industrial users. The company has been directly contacting people they know to be potential tenants or developers.

"We still don't have a contract in place," Adams said. "We are working on trying to market it and keep expanding the possibilities."

Andrews said any tenant interested in developing a data center would have to commit to at least 50,000 square feet of the building, or 50 percent of the first phase. Grindstone Investments also is willing to work with prospects interested in developing the property for an industrial purpose other than a data center.

“Grindstone indicated that they aren’t closing their door to any potential prospect,” Zenner said. “The land is for sale as a certified industrial development site.”

Under M-C zoning, the property could be used in a number of different ways. Access to U.S. 63 and proximity to the city’s COLT rail line would make it site a good location for a distribution facility or a freight terminal for storage of commercial products. Limited manufacturing could be done onsite, or the property could be developed into a research and development laboratory.

“It’s difficult to say what specific users would bring,” Zenner said. “A number of higher intensity uses are allowed under M-C zoning, but they would be unlikely to go there.”