PEORIA, AZ — Residents in Peoria claim they were “misled” and “lied to” over Amkor’s development plans to build a high-tech chip packaging plant just off Loop 303 in Five North at Vistancia.
"We were originally told that Amkor was coming that it was going to be no more than 500,000 square feet total over two phases, and the max height for it would be 54 feet,” Megan Staub, a resident near the Amkor site told ABC15. “Our last community meeting with Amkor presented that it's now going to be about 2.1 million square feet and 118 feet tall, so more than double what was originally told and sold to us.”
Staub, along with a handful of other local Peoria residents told ABC15 they did not find out about the change in scale of the project until a community meeting last week when Amkor Senior Vice President and Chief of Staff in the Business Unit told the crowd “we’ll be pretty close to the TSMC height,” but “about one-third of the TSMC area.”
"Every meeting has continually changed for what was promised,” another resident told ABC15.
The updated proposal will employ roughly 2,000 employees and represent approximately two million square feet in size when the project is complete.
In an email, Peoria City Councilmember Matt Bullock said the decision to scale up was a business need, and that Amkor always had the ability to expand under the zoning and entitlements on the property that date back to the 1990s.
"Since there was only a little bit of space to build out (footprint), they had to build up and add a second floor to double the assembly lines in each of the 2 buildings,” Bullock told ABC15 in an email. "The City of Peoria could not say “no” to the size and height when they were told by Amkor, that Amkor was going to exercise its right to build to the limit of the zoning entitlement.”
While Staub acknowledged the zoning didn’t change, she said Peoria did.
“The community doesn’t want an industrial building, you know when there was no residential anything out here then maybe an industrial plant would've worked but it has definitely changed since 1990,” Staub said.
In a statement, the City of Peoria said "The market demand for their services and recent infusion of federal dollars allows for the company to build at a size that continues to meet the zoning requirements of this site that have been in place for well over 20 years,” adding that "Amkor’s presence will spur the additional retail, commercial and restaurants in the area by providing a daytime and nighttime customer base.”
Amkor noted that it has not yet submitted its final site proposal to the city. Residents told ABC15 that if Amkor doesn’t scale back or move locations, they’ll consider moving.
"We just retired and now we’re thinking about moving again and it just breaks our hearts to have to do that,” Lee Cox said.
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