Planned Amazon warehouse in Salinas goes kaput due to rising construction costs.

A planned five-story Amazon warehouse in the Salinas Ag Industrial Center—which would have had 2.9 million square feet of space on a 634,000-square-foot footprint—has been tabled indefinitely.

Salinas City Manager Steve Carrigan says that Wednesday morning, April 13, during a weekly conference call with developer Scannell Properties about the project, Scannell reps informed the city that their client was pulling the plug due to the rising costs of construction since the Covid pandemic began disrupting global supply chains in the past few years.

But officials from the city won’t tell you it was planned to be an Amazon project because of a nondisclosure agreement the city signed a few years ago that precludes them speaking in detail about many aspects of the project.

(The Weekly was able to confirm earlier this year, through a Public Records Act request, that the company is indeed Amazon.)

“Everything was going great,” Carrigan says. "The high cost of building materials just caught up with the project.” 

Carrigan says he’s been working with developers at Scannell Properties since last fall, holding regular weekly meetings, and says he feels like they’re on the same team, and he takes them at their word for the reason their client is walking away.

“Covid-19 has been taking a lot of victims, and it took another victim this week,” he says. “It is what it is, but it’s time to move on.”

Salinas Mayor Kimbley Craig is likewise disappointed. 

“We thought we were going to get an engagement ring and they broke up with us instead,” she says, adding that if the cost of construction comes down in the future she hopes the company (Amazon, though again she cannot say that), considers reviving it. “Our doors are always open for big companies to come in and bring 2,000-plus jobs to the community.”

The Salinas Ag Industrial Center was approved in 2009, and this was the first project proposed on the site since. 

Salinas City Councilmember Anthony Rocha has a more nuanced view of the developments—both the planned one and the recent news—and is forthright in saying that “transparency and accountability in governance” should be the “top priority” for government officials, and he laments that an NDA was signed that hamstrung his ability to talk about the project publicly, particularly to his constituents, whom he was elected to serve.

“This process has unfortunately eroded trust in our local government,” he says. “Salinas is a city that struggles with extreme economic disparity, and potential land use projects should be discussed in public so that constituents can have their voices heard.”