Copyright Hartford Courant
With a crew of more than 200 construction workers, Amazon is turning most of a 157-acre property on the Naugatuck-Waterbury line into what will be one of its biggest distribution centers in the state. City and state leaders gathered at the sprawling, muddy construction site Tuesday to celebrate what they expect will be one of the region’s biggest employers when it opens sometime in 2027 or 2028. “This marks the start of new opportunities and a much more vibrant regional economy,” Waterbury Mayor Paul Pernerewski Jr. told an audience of business leaders, community officials and Amazon senior managers. “It’s going to be a true game-changer for our region. It’s going to bring 1,000 really good-paying jobs to the area, it’s going to strengthen our local families and businesses.” The five-story behemoth will use automation to sort and ship as many as 800,000 packages a day, and will take up more square footage than the West Farms Mall and Danbury Fair Mall combined. Even so, Amazon projects that it will need 1,000 employees and said fulfillment and transportation workers will average $23 an hour. To officials in the Naugatuck Valley, where brass mills and others powered a thriving middle-class economy through the mid-20th century, Amazon is one of the few big-scale job new sources amid the decades-long trickle of factory shutdowns. “I’ve worked on construction projects my whole life, I’ve never seen anything like this − it’s unbelievable,” Naugatuck Mayor Pete Hess said over the engine noise of a small fleet of cranes and earth movers. “The steel we’re erecting today is going to hold up much more than a building. It’s going to hold up jobs, dreams and a shared prosperity that will bind Naugatuck and Waterbury forever.” As enormous as the new center will be, it is still sized about 600,000 square feet smaller than its premier Connecticut facility, BDL4 in Windsor just beyond Bradley International Airport. The Waterbury center will be largely hidden from public view at the back of an industrial park, while BDL4 dominates the skyline for Bradley flyers who recall the property as sprawling shade tobacco fields. The new center will perform essentially the same work as BDL4, but with a higher concentration of robotics to sort and move products along miles of conveyors stretching across acres of shelving and bins. The company anticipates contractors will complete the building shell by early 2027, but say the opening will come later because Amazon will need to install all of the moving parts inside. The project didn’t get done without controversy: Some homeowners have complained about rock blasting as Bluewater Property Group and its subcontractors clear the land and erect enormous retaining walls around the building’s foundation. A few residents have complained about tax incentives for the retail giant and the relatively low price it paid for the municipally owned property. But overall leaders in both communities have endorsed the project, anticipating tens of millions of dollars in new tax revenue along with a much-needed employment boost. “Amazon I believe is the second-biggest employer in the state of Connecticut. This (project) is 3.2 million square feet, 60 football fields, 300 construction jobs,” Gov. Ned Lamont said, noting the company has other mega-centers in Wallingford and North Haven along with large operations in more than a dozen other towns.
