One of the tenants at Pasco’s Reimann Industrial Center hasn’t even broken ground yet but is already planning to more than double its footprint at the quickly-filling industrial park.

Port of Pasco commissioners unanimously agreed to enter a purchase and sale agreement with cold storage provider Cold Summit for a roughly 41-acre site at Reimann for nearly $6.2 million in mid-December. That puts the Idaho company’s holdings at the park to 72 acres.

Cold Summit and port officials have negotiated the deal since September, when port commissioners approved a letter of intent for the sale with the then-undisclosed buyer.

While the port is “working on a couple of housekeeping items” related to the sale, said Stephen McFadden, the port’s director of economic development and marketing, it brings Cold Summit’s total investment in the community to $290 million, along with the eventual creation of 200 permanent jobs at its yet-to-be-built facilities.

“They didn’t want to risk missing their window of opportunity,” McFadden told the Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business when the letter of intent was approved.

Cold Summit was founded in 2019 and has six cold storage facilities across the country, with three of them fully leased out and another available for lease beginning in the second quarter of this year. It has worked extensively with Michigan-based Lineage Logistics, which has operations and facilities throughout the Tri-Cities and Mid-Columbia.

The port sold an initial 30-acre parcel to Cold Summit in April for $4.5 million. Jason Fincher, the company’s vice president of strategy and logistics, told the Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business. While the design of that facility has not yet been finalized, company officials said they will tailor the building to the specific needs of the region’s cold storage and food logistics operators.  

One of the company’s two facilities in Dallas was built on a similarly-sized parcel of land in 2021. It is 343,000 square feet and cost about $60 million to build.

McFadden told port commissioners that Cold Summit could start construction on its first facility in the late summer or early fall of 2026. The company is also considering waiving its feasibility window on the more recent sale so that it could potentially start construction on its second facility before the end of 2026 as well.

For the port, the land sale will do more than fulfill its goal to stimulate job growth. The proceeds from this most recent sale will essentially pay for part of a 165-acre expansion of Reimann that the port recently negotiated with agricultural operator Balcom & Moe, McFadden said.