Isle of Wight County supervisors voted unanimously on Oct. 17 to give final approval for a larger, and colder, “Project Air Station.”

That’s the codename Isle of Wight County Economic Development has given to the first occupant of the Shirley T. Holland Intermodal Park’s long-planned third phase. Air Station General LC, the Virginia Beach-based developer of the project, is proposing a 240,000-square-foot cold storage distribution facility.

The supervisors previously voted in 2023 to approve exceptions to Isle of Wight’s highway corridor overlay district requirements to permit a roughly 130,000-square-foot cross-dock warehouse which would have seen half its then-proposed 140 loading bays face Walters Highway. 

The Oct. 17 vote grants another exception that will allow the use of metal siding.

The company contends controlling the interior temperature of the building requires a light-colored metal exterior wall with insulated foam adjacent to the interior walls. An illustration of the changes shows the revised design Ould no longer have loading bays facing Walters Highway.

Eddie Friedrichs, field management superintendent for WTW Development, brought samples of the proposed exterior material to the supervisors’ meeting.

“Your fasteners are actually hidden … almost looks like a tilt-up wall,” Friedrichs said, referring to a type of concrete wall that is erected by crane.

Kevin Lefcoe, a representative of Air Station General LC, previously told the county’s Planning Commission in September that his company has connected with a local distributor of cold storage. The facility, Lefcoe said, will support local farming and distributors who use the Port of Virginia.

Air Station General is under contract to purchase the 135-acre parcel currently owned by Isle of Wight’s Economic Development Authority. It’s the same site where, in 2019, county supervisors attempted to lure a Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice correctional center.

According to Economic Development Director Kristi Sutphin the agreed-upon purchase price is for $35,000 per developable acre. Roughly 35 acres are developable, bringing the total sale price to roughly $1.2 million.

Much of the land surrounding the Project Air Station site is wetlands.  Plans to develop the Shirley T. Holland park’s third phase began in 2013 when supervisors rezoned 969 acres as “conditional limited industrial.” In 2019, an environmental study determined much of Phase III to be wetlands due to the presence of loblolly pines, a tree the Army Corps of Engineers reclassified as a wetland plant in 2012. The Project Air Station site is one of the few Phase III parcels that remains buildable.

For that reason, the supervisors also voted unanimously on Oct. 17 to amend the conditional industrial zoning for Phase III to remove any reference to design criteria for signage, which according to Sutphin came at the request of the Economic Development Authority.

“What we’re asking for is to remove some outdated language related to signage from the 2013 approved proffers,” Sutphin said. “Those design criteria basically only allowed for a Shirley T. Holland Intermodal Park entrance sign on (Route) 258 and Buckhorn (Drive) because at the time the development was envisioned to be multiple buildings, over 4 million square feet, and it would be pretty much all interior signage and then just have those entrance signs on the road. Removing those criteria would enable a future tenant of Project Air Station, the cold storage facility, to have their own sign at the road and then have their signage on the building.”

That signage would still have to comply with the county’s sign ordinance, Sutphin said.

County officials last year estimated Project Air Station would employ 250 people and that the facility would see roughly 50 tractor-trailers per day. Lefcoe, at the Planning Commission meeting, said those estimates are largely unchanged under the current cold storage plan, which he said would employ a minimum of 200 employees. He estimates the facility would house 10 to 15 separate companies leasing 10,000- to 20,000-square-foot spaces.

The revised design won’t break ground until 2025. In May, the EDA reinstated its lease of 236 acres at the site to Carr Farms through Dec. 31.