Expansion planned for east Vancouver warehouse

Gensco is planning a 50,000-square-foot expansion to its warehouse on Northeast 56th Street in Vancouver.

The Tacoma-based company is a distributor and manufacturer of heating, ventilating and cooling products. It has locations in Washington, Oregon, Montana, Alaska and Idaho.

The building, at 12620 N.E. 56th St., will be a single-story tilt-up panel building, with warehouse, office and storage space, as well as a 4-foot-tall loading dock for equipment transportation, according to documents submitted to the city of Vancouver.

The company is planning to hire about 10 more employees to man the facility.

Gensco currently has a 50,000-square-foot warehouse on the property, so the project would result in just over 100,000 square feet of space between that and the new addition.

The project is planning to add 12 parking stalls in front of the building and will have 108 spaces in all. There will also be new overflow parking on the property.

Traffic isn’t expected to rise considerably, with the project planners expecting fewer than 20 trips to and from the facility during peak hours.

The property could potentially have archaeological artifacts and is presently undergoing an archaeological predetermination, which the city requires when a project is in such an area.

According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood map, part of the site is within the 500-year flood zone, though Gensco isn’t proposing any work in that area right now.

An expansion was part of the original plan for Gensco’s initial warehouse project, so much of the infrastructure is already in place. There will be a new bioretention facility to catch runoff from the newly paved parking lot and truck well and from the loading dock.

The 6.04-acre lot is already zoned for light industrial use.

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