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Old Panasonic site proves perfect spot for expansion
A $12 billion company's controversial relocation was simply an $11.6 billion company's fuel for expansion within the New Jersey market.
At least that's how District Manager James Golini sees it.
Ferguson Enterprises - the country's largest wholesale distributor of commercial and residential plumbing supplies, based in Newport News, Virginia - celebrated on Wednesday its grand opening of the "first mega (shipping) hub of its kind" at the former Panasonic Corp. of North America headquarters site in the Harmon Cove section of Secaucus.
"When the building became available, we didn't think it was an option at first," Golini said. "But through negotiation with the landlord and Panasonic's relocation, it made perfect sense for us to take the facility."
Ferguson Enterprises has occupied the 460,000-square-foot space since March, about two years after Panasonic moved to Newark with the help of a $102.4 million state tax credit.
"We realized that, in order for us to grow in the marketplace, we had to have a centralized point of distribution so that we could service all of the businesses (we've acquired)," Golini said.
You might call it a happy ending for a controversy sparked in 2011, when Panasonic was awarded the tax credit under the state's Urban Transit Hub program. Critics blasted the outsized incentive, saying it allowed Panasonic to move some 10 miles to Newark and was helping the city at the expense of a suburb.
That led to a lawsuit by Harmon Cove landlord Hartz Mountain Industries against the state Economic Development Authority, spurring an overhaul of the agency's incentives programs that resulted in new...