There will be a ribbon-cutting ceremony in October with state and local officials, but Amazon’s new delivery station in Gypsum, across from the Eagle County airport, has been open since late August.  

Sam Bailey, the senior manager of economic development for Amazon in Colorado, said the company expects the facility to hit a mix of 50 full-time and part-time jobs in the near future, with the potential to scale up to 100.

“With the site less than a month open, we’re taking our time to really get our training down and our capacity comfortable with the site team so that we can then scale from there,” Bailey said. “When we launch a new site, we often will give that site the opportunity to really focus on training our full-time managers and our part-time managers up to the capacity that’s assigned to the site. And then once we have that comfort level, we can then introduce new capacity into the site.”

The opening of the facility marks the latest development in Amazon’s expansion across the state, which includes an emphasis on connecting dots along the Western Slope.

Amazon opened a delivery station in Grand Junction in January and expects to open a Montrose delivery station later this year. The world’s largest online retailer is also expanding its Front Range footprint, opening a Logan County delivery station in March with plans to open a Colorado Springs facility this fall, along with a same-day delivery facility in Arapahoe County that will serve the Denver metro area.

The Gypsum delivery station will serve customers within an hour’s drive time of the facility in all directions. Amazon’s large fulfillment center network in metro Denver processes online orders before sending them to a sortation center — also known as a middle-mile facility — which fills trucks with completed orders to be sent to a delivery center. When full trucks arrive in Gypsum with completed orders, packages are unloaded and assigned to various delivery routes, with drivers delivering packages to a customer’s front door.

“The Amazon delivery center means more jobs for our folks, more opportunity for our town, and maybe even quicker packages on our porches,” Gypsum Mayor Steve Carver said in a statement. “That’s good news, Gypsum, and good news for Colorado.”

A facility that started with a phone call

The new facility near the airport represents the latest development in an area that town officials have prioritized for economic development over the last three decades. It’s just up the hill from the Costco and close to the Tesla dealership and service center.

Bailey said the process of bringing the facility to Gypsum started with a phone call to town manager Jeremy Rietmann, whom he has known for years through various economic development initiatives. With Rietmann confirming that a delivery facility aligned with the town’s own goals, Baily said the process went smoothly from there.

“Once we saw we were halfway there, we went through the process of acquiring the land and then building a brand-new Amazon facility,” Bailey said. “The town of Gypsum made this really easy for us to bring an industrial site to a community that’s really focused on being hyper-local while still allowing us to best serve our customers.”

This story is from VailDaily.com.