First look at Eli Lilly’s planned $3.5 billion Lehigh Valley plant: When will construction start, how much traffic will it cause?

The Upper Macungie Township Planning Commission was given an initial look at the proposed Eli Lilly and Co. manufacturing complex at its meeting Wednesday night.

A team of company representatives gave an overview of the $3.5 billion project. The nearly 800,000-square-foot building would be on 150 acres between Old Route 22 and Interstate 78 just west of Fogelsville.

“In May, we celebrate 150 years of making medicine, life-changing medicine, to make lives better for people around the world,” said Daniel VonDielingen, Lilly’s senior vice president — global parenteral network expansion. “That is our tenure, and we’re very excited to be able to bring this state-of-the-art manufacturer plant site right here to Upper Macungie Township.”

The manufacturing site will include manufacturing buildings, a visitor center, administrative offices, and an automated storage and retrieval system. It will assemble injectable medications, including Zepbound and, in the future, Retatrutide, a next-generation medication that is currently in clinical trials.

No actions were taken by the commission. The project was tabled to allow for further engineering reviews and a formal response to the township’s review letter.

But commission members had questions for the Lilly team.

Chair Paul McNemar wanted to know the timeline. The company is anticipating groundbreaking and the start of construction this year, with the major construction phase taking place between 2026 and 2029. Systems integration, including high-tech installation and initial staffing, is expected to begin in 2030. Full operations with the anticipated staff of 850 would start in 2031.

“We typically start off with heavy construction in those first two years, and then, as you can imagine, we buy very complicated pieces of equipment that go into the building,” said John Russo, Lilly’s site project manager. “Construction will start ramping down, and we’ll have to start commissioning and qualifying all [the] process equipment. The timeline, I guess, is four years.”

Other questions included traffic concerns, zoning and variances, and environmental impacts.

Truck traffic was a concern, especially tractor-trailers that may access Route 100 via Main Street through Fogelsville. The traffic impact study from Lilly anticipates 45 trucks coming to the facility daily with 90 trips total during normal operations.

Commission member Christopher Walls was also worried about construction vehicles as the project will require about 2,000 workers.

“Traffic is probably the big elephant in the room,” Walls said. “Most people out there are not familiar with what it’s going to take [to build this].”

The plan is the have trucks use Glenlivet Drive to bypass Fogelsville and get to Route 100 and I-78.

Another access point for trucks to the site will be the future interchange between I-78 and Adams Road near the property’s western entrance. However, PennDOT does not anticipate it to be complete until after the plant opens.

Member Tim Helmer wanted to know about plant safety and whether there would be any special security substances or toxic gases that would be on the site. An audience member wanted to know what would be brought in on the trucks once operations begin.

Russo said the raw materials for the medicines will not be made onsite and are not shipped in tanker trucks. “It’s very small packaging material.”

“What we do on our side is we mix a solution,” Russo said. “It goes into a container that’s either a cartridge or prefilled syringe or a vial. There is no chemical processing, there is no byproduct here.”

The facility is expected to use 255,000 gallons of water per day and the company is working with the Lehigh County Authority on a pump station improvement. There are no plans for an on-site wastewater treatment plant. Any waste would be monitored before being discharged into the general sanitary system.

Other topics of discussion included a variance for the building’s height of 110 feet, which exceeds the standard code, and waivers regarding driveway widths, curbing for utility roads, and deferrals for landscaping/tree preservation until the Adams Road interchange project is finalized.

The Lehigh Valley Planning Commission will take up the project at its Comprehensive Planning Committee meeting next Tuesday.

Source:MSN News