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Centers of Excellence The community of Lewiston-Auburn is rapidly becoming a transportation and logistics hub in northern New England. St. Lawrence & Atlantic Railroad operates the area's only double-stack intermodal facility, while the U.S. Customs Port in Auburn is now the busiest land-locked port in northern New England. Through a network of Canadian National rail lines, St. Lawrence & Atlantic also provides cargo clients with international connections via ports in Halifax and Vancouver. Nearby, Safe Handling is a bulk transloading facility serving the paper and chemical industries, and further adds to the full-service rail client concept. The City of Auburn recently approved plans for a new 144-acre Auburn Industrial Park. Plans call for container and trailer storage, inventory tracking services, and space dedicated exclusively for users of the Foreign Trade Zone. The park, located on the south side of the airport, will allow users access to rail, air, and highway transportation, an intermodal facility, access to a Foreign Trade Zone, and Pine Tree Zone benefits. Furthermore, the location is a convenient one from which to operate: less than an hour from Augusta, Portland, Western Maine, and Bath/Brunswick. Bisson Transportation, headquartered in West Bath, Maine, plans to develop a 300,000-square-foot distribution center at the new park. The new park will also offer container and trailer storage, inventory tracking services, and space dedicated exclusively for users of Auburn's new Foreign Trade Zone. The catalyst for building the new industrial park came largely after the community received designation last year from the U.S. Department of Commerce to establish a General Purpose Foreign Trade Zone on a 760-acre parcel of land. Considered outside the territory of U.S. Customs, an FTZ allows qualified companies that conduct international trade to eliminate or defer tariffs on finished goods and raw materials. Safe Handling, Inc. also has plans to construct two warehouses totaling 250,000 square feet in a master plan to expand its services. That plan includes adding seven rail spurs, with four initially providing 8,000 feet of track with room to accommodate 100 rail cars. The warehouses, part of the second phase, will be used to store freight before it is shipped by rail or truck. Lewiston-Auburn has a growing number of sophisticated distribution centers, including a recent $60 million Wal*Mart Food Distribution Center with dry goods and refrigerated food facilities totaling 900,000 square feet when it is completed in mid-2006. The Wal*Mart center serves Super Wal*Marts throughout New England. Other warehouse facilities include Country Kitchen's distribution center for its breads and baked goods, VIP Parts, Tires, and Service, White Rock Distilleries, and a newly announced 101,000-square-foot warehouse in the Gendron Business Park to accommodate Tire Warehouse.
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