The national container, storage and moving company PODS Enterprises LLC is seeking approval from the town of North Castle to use a warehouse that”™s under construction in Armonk as a site for its container operations. PODS currently does not have warehouse locations in Westchester. It has about 230 sites in North America, including in: Valley Cottage and Marlboro in the Hudson Valley; Calverton, Hauppauge, Wainscott and Melville on Long Island; Jamaica in New York City; and Bristol in Connecticut.
Anthony F. Veneziano Jr. of the Armonk-based law firm Veneziano & Associates, told the North Castle Planning Board that PODS had retained the firm to obtain necessary approvals for the company to use a 71,573-square-foot warehouse that is under construction at 94 Business Park Drive in Armonk.
Veneziano represented Aggro and Brassie LLC and Armonk Fairview LLC when they sought approvals to build the warehouse. The applicant was seeking site plan approval, wetlands permit and tree removal permit approvals to demolish the existing motel and the construction of the warehouse with associated off-street parking and landscaping improvements. The plan for building the warehouse called for providing 150 parking spaces at the site.
Veneziano said that as of about a month ago the developer and PODS were close to finalizing a lease for PODS to take the space. He said that before the lease could be signed, an approved amended site plan was needed in order to cover what PODS would be doing.
There would be a total of 978 PODS containers accommodated inside of the warehouse. They would be stacked three levels high.
In addition to storing containers inside of the warehouse, PODS is proposing having 36 spaces outside where containers could be stacked three-high for a total of 108 outdoor containers. He said that the outdoor containers would be empty and as containers are needed off-site they”™d be taken from the outdoor supply. The total number of containers at the site, inside and outside, would be a peak of 1,086.
Veneziano said that PODS anticipates initially having from three to five employees at the site, with as many as 10 employed there in the future.
The site on which the warehouse is being built covers 5.52 acres and includes a wetlands buffer.
PODS reports that it currently has more than 227,000 portable storage containers in service and has completed about 1.4 million long-distance moves and about six million deliveries. Rather than following a traditional model of loading a moving van with a customer”™s furnishings, PODS delivers a container or multiple containers to the customer”™s business or residential location in advance of when a move will originate so that customers can complete the loading at their convenience. It also notes that PODS containers can be used for temporary storage of furniture and other items while a renovation project is underway, or used much as would be a rented unit at a self-storage facility.
PODS points out that an advantage of their container system is that customers who need extra storage space can load their goods into a PODS container and keep the container at their house or business or have PODS pick it up and store it at one of its warehouses. When they want to access the contents of a container, they can make an appointment and the container will be retrieved from its location in the warehouse and brought to an area where customers can access it.
