Home > About BNE > Press Room > 2007 Archive > February > 60 Acres Will Be Added To Buffalo Lakeside Commerce Park

60 acres will be added to industrial park in city
Lakeside Commerce Park will grow to 250 acres

By DAVID ROBINSON
News Business Reporter
2/13/2007

The Buffalo Lakeside Commerce Park is getting bigger.

The industrial park, built along a former brownfield that straddles the Union Ship Canal, is expected to grow by almost 60 acres once the Buffalo Urban Development Corp. closes on a pair of property acquisitions in the next month.

Those purchases, coupled with the earlier acquisition of a separate 75-acre parcel at the northeastern end of the park, will give the development agency control over the entire 250-acre site, including about 150 acres that can developed in the future.

The park, if fully developed, could be home for nearly 3 million square feet of building space and give the city a significant source of shovel-ready land available to business, said Peter Cammarata, the urban development agency's interim president.

"It's a significant project," Cammarata said.

Development officials have long planned to extend the park to the newly- or soon-to-be-acquired parcels, and the acquisitions will solidify efforts to expand the project beyond its first phase, which has been concentrated on the south side of the canal.

Once the property purchases are completed, the land will require environmental remediation work before it can be developed for tenants.

Once the land is in hand, work will begin to extend the park's main roadway to Tifft Street and along the northern end of the complex, funded in part by $5 million from the state Dormitory Authority, Cammarata said.

"This is a project that no private-sector developer could afford to do," said Dennis Penman, the chairman of the Erie County Development Agency and executive vice president of M.J. Peterson Real Estate Corp.

Because of the contamination that lingers at the industrial site, infrastructure costs within the park, such as lighting utilities and environmental cleanup, have been running at around $1,200 per linear foot, Cammarata said. That's about eight to 10 times what a private-sector developer might expect to pay for infrastructure costs on a project on clean land, Penman said.

"The cost of cleaning up a site can be astronomical," said Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown.

The park already is home to a pair of businesses - CertainTeed Corp. and Cobey Inc. - that have built a combined 400,000 square feet of building space on 37 acres along the south side of the canal. The two companies employ a total of about 350 workers.

The industrial complex also will include a $7.5 million park that will extend out about 200 feet from all sides of the canal. The parkland will include grass, landscaped paths and shrubs, with a pedestrian bridge eventually planned to be built over the canal. Construction on the park is expected to begin this summer.

drobinson@buffnews.com