New England Motor Freight has land in Cecil County under contract,

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Dec 15, 2003 by Ezra Fieser

New England Motor Freight, a $175 million trucking company, has more than 41 acres of Cecil County land under contract where it plans to build a trucking depot.

The company, which has 30 terminals in 12 states, including Maryland, has not closed the purchase with MIE Properties Inc., but the deal is expected to be finalized next month.

MIE Vice President Gerard Jerry Wit said the closing was delayed a month to allow for the building permit to be issued.

The deal could conceivably not happen. I hope it does and I'm 99 percent sure it will, but there's a chance, Wit said.

New England Motor, which did not return calls for comment, plans to build a 150,000-square-foot trucking depot, Wit said.

The New Jersey-based company, which employs 2,700 people, has trucking centers in Essex and Hagerstown.

The addition of a new, stable, warehousing company comes amid a year of ups and downs for the northeastern Maryland industrial market. Over the past year, several companies have pulled out of the area.

Fleming Foods, which filed for bankruptcy last week, vacated a 350,000-square-foot warehouse across the street from the New England Motor site in North East. And Michel Distribution Services, TelcoBuy.com and Supervalu all pulled out of large blocks of space in Harford County.

A midyear report by real estate firm Colliers Pinkard showed Cecil County struggling with an 84 percent vacancy rate and Harford County with 31 percent of its space vacant.

However, in Cecil County, ProLogis Corp. is building a 1 million- square-foot distribution center for General Electric's appliance division.

And a group of investors is reviewing the former Fleming distribution center in the North East Commerce Center with an eye toward developing it into the Maryland I-95 International Mega Mall, which Cecil County Office of Economic Development Director Paul Gilbert calls more of an Asian trade center and exhibition space.

It would basically be a merchandise mart, Gilbert said. There would be a lot of wholesalers, but if you wanted to come up and buy one product, they say there will be sales to the public.

Preliminary plans for the site call for a three-phase development that would add a second floor onto the 350,000-square-foot building and build a parking lot for about 3,000 cars. The plans say the $145 million development would be expanded in coming years to add a European Boutique Product Plaza and an African & Latin American Commercial & Cultural Square.

For MIE, the pending sale coupled with New England Motor's potential deal would relieve it of the North East Commerce Center.

We've been struggling with it for 10 years and then all of a sudden [two deals] come along and we'd be out, Wit said.