Malheur County officials are considering selling the unfinished Treasure Valley Reload Center and the county’s undeveloped industrial park to a national railroad company.
Such a sale would bring to an end a decade of work at public expense to turn farmland just outside Nyssa into an industrial complex.
But there is a long road ahead to make such a deal happen, officials said.
They disclosed the possible sale on Tuesday, Dec. 17, as the Malheur County Development Corp. Board voted to enter a letter of with Jaguar Transportation Holdings, a logistics company that now owns the Vale-based Oregon Eastern Railroad.
The Malheur County Court was scheduled to consider a similar move on Wednesday, Dec. 18.
Shawna Peterson, development company executive director, said the letter of intent put the public company, the county and Jaguar into a 120-day due diligence period to potentially move forward with a sale of the Nyssa rail center project.
Peterson said the letter spells out that the purchase price would be “mutually agreed” by the county and Jaguar Transportation.
No figure has been disclosed, but the reload center so far has taken more than $30 million in public funds and is far from complete. Construction has stopped while officials figure out the best use for the reload center. The project was originally designed to ship Treasure Valley onions.
Jaguar would buy that 65-acre site and the county’s industrial park. The park was never developed and much of it remains used for farming.
The county in 2020 bought the 285-acre property that sits west of the Union Pacific Railroad line serving Nyssa and Arcadia Boulevard, about two miles north of Nyssa. Dubbed the Arcadia Industrial Park, the bare land with no services was the foundation for the Treasure Valley Reload Center and an adjacent industrial park.
The county paid $3,424,550, using a $2.4 million loan from Business Oregon, the state economic development agency, and pulled $969,900 from the county’s contingency, or rainy day, fund to make the buy.
Taylor Rembowski, the county’s economic director, said in a phone interview on Tuesday, Dec. 17, that the county is at a point where it is necessary to move forward with the potential sale should it be “mutually beneficial” for the county and Jaguar. He said that the benefits for the county would be job growth and more families moving into the area.
Rembowski said one of the most significant upsides of a potential sale to Jaguar would be the company’s longstanding relationship with Union Pacific.
He said the county development company’s lack of a previous relationship with Union Pacific has been one reason the project has not worked.
Jaguar Transport was founded in 2018 and is operated by a father-son team out of Joplin, Missouri. On its website, the company says of its mission, “We aim to become the premier transportation company utilizing our expertise in transportation and logistics.”
The company owns 11 short-line railroads, including Oregon Eastern Railroad in Vale, which operates on 27 miles of track from Ontario through Vale to the EP Minerals plant west of Vale.
Jaguar bought Oregon Eastern in 2020, along with four other railroads, in a deal financed in part by one of Canada’s largest pension funds. In 2022, Oregon Eastern established its own reload center in Vale, primarily for shipping lumber.
Tim Enayati, senior vice president of commercial development with Jaguar, said with an established presence in the region, the company sees the potential acquisition as a way to expand the company’s footprint.
“We view this as a great opportunity,” he said.
Over the next 120 days, Enayati said the company will have more open conversations not just in eastern Oregon but with their customers to understand better how to best use the property to support economic growth in the county.
“You have this great piece of infrastructure and land that’s already been developed on the property,” Enayati said. “Our goal would be to, as quickly as possible, as opportunities present themselves, to start utilizing it to create solutions.”
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