The York County Economic Development Authority has acquired a 30.82-acre site in Busch Industrial Park as an investment.
The undeveloped tract of land is shovel-ready, according to York County Economic Development Director Jim Noel. It is has gas, water, sewer, electricity and road access — as well as frontage along Interstate 64 and immediate access to exit 242 — making it a prime location for industrial development, he said.
The EDA paid $700,000 for the site.
“We’re really excited and this is a great opportunity for the EDA,” Noel said. “In order to be competitive in today’s market, you’ve got to have sites like this because your competition certainly does. While in some sense you’re competing on the strength of your community, you have to have product, and product are those sites that are ready to go in environments that the company is going to find works for their particular business model.”
Noel said the site naturally splits into three parcels. He said he has already presented one of the parcels to a company as the potential site of a 30,000-square-foot manufacturing operation. His office has performed a concept review on another one of the parcels for an 88,000-square-foot manufacturing operation.
The land was owned by the Anheuser Busch Foundation, which was in talks with the Civil War Trust to potentially donate the land for preservation.
“We don’t have a lot of land, especially with infrastructure, zoning and more for quality light industrial development, so [the EDA] said see what tax credit means financially and would they sell it to us at that price,” Noel said. “To their credit, they were willing to do that.”
Busch Industrial Park is located in Upper York County near the intersection of Route 199 and I-64. The area was the setting of part of the Battle of Williamsburg, an 1862 fight between Union and Confederate forces. The battlefield was recently included on the top-10 most endangered sites in Virginia list compiled by Preservation Virginia, a nonprofit devoted to preserving and revitalizing historically significant sites in Virginia.
The EDA voted unanimously to acquire the land at its March 2014 meeting.
The York County Parcel Viewer lists the 2014 assessed value of the land as $1,640,000. The site has more than 1,000 feet of frontage along I-64. It also abuts a large stormwater retention pond in the center of Busch Industrial Park.
The property does have several utility easements on it. An easement confers upon a party the right to use land owned by another, such as for power lines that exist over the property the EDA just acquired. Noel said materials used in manufacturing can be stored beneath the power lines.
