City of Dixon reports it will bring an additional 60 jobs

DIXON, CA (MPG) - GE Appliances, a Haier Company, has been electrifying and modernizing life while bringing convenience and fun to kitchens and homes for more than 100 years. Now, they’ll be providing that from Dixon’s backyard.

That humongous building going up next to Walmart on Dorset Drive, is a GE Appliance Warehouse—not for sales"'but for distribution.

Bulldozers and front loaders have been scraping the surrounding grounds this past week and walls are in place. The building is 505,000 sq. ft. with about 492,000 used for warehouse and 10,000 used for office space, according to City of Dixon staff report and Larry Burkhardt, Economic Development/Grants Manager at City of Dixon. 

“It is 10 acres and the concrete pad was the size of a football field"'that is pretty impressive,” said Burkhardt who walked it when the concrete was laid. He reminded that there will be no sales tax revenue generated being that there will be no sales at the facility. But, City of Dixon reports do show it will bring an additional 60 jobs, hopefully for Dixonites.

Even from nearby Vaughn Road, the concrete building looks huge surely because of the 50-feet tall walls on 31 acres that are creating some discussion on social media. It is being built by Scannell Properties, an Indianapolis-based company with a Northern California branch in Lafayette.  

The building will have 126 loading docks for trucks. The garage door-like enclosures at the back of the warehouse are an effective way to ensure that large freight trucks get loaded and unloaded efficiently. And, there will be about 50 trucks per day loading and unloading appliances. They will travel on a 50-foot-wide driveway that surrounds the building. For other workers, there will be two additional driveways at the site.

The facility will also have a 6-foot-tall galvanized steel gate entrance, a 120,000-gallon water storage tank, and a 14-foot-tall pump room, according to City Associate Planner Scott Greeley in a report to the Planning Commissioners back in February of 2019 when it was approved. The project also calls for expanding a stormwater retention pond nearby from six acres to just over eight acres. Estimated completion date is unknown at press time.

GE Appliances is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, and is part of the global corporation Haier Group, which has six appliance brands. GE makes refrigerators, freezers, dishwashers, washers, dryers, water filtration systems, air conditioners, and water heaters.

In the list of the Top 100 Most Valuable Chinese Brands in 2018, Haier ranked first, with a brand value of 209.208 billion yuan (if I’ve done my math right, that is about $32 billion dollars.) In July 2018, Qingdao Haier Co., Ltd. entered the Fortune Global 500 list with overwhelming momentum for its amazing revenue scale and brand strength in smart home and advanced manufacturing, according to Google on July 15, 2021.