Developers detail plans for sprawling TRI II project in Fernley

The TRI II project is planned for a plot of private land on the south side of Fernley, west of Highway 95A and east of the Storey/Lyon county line. Photo: Colleen Unterbrink

by Rob Sabo

When Lance Gilman and Don Roger Norman purchased 107,000 acres of raw land in the Northern Nevada high desert east of Sparks in 1998, they had no idea that less than two decades later they would be out of land for sale.

The duo who developed Tahoe Reno Industrial Center in Storey County are now eying their next big project, a similar but smaller development in Lyon County at Fernley dubbed, simply, “TRI II.”

Smaller is a subjective word, though – the developers already have purchased more than 10 square miles of private land on the south side of Fernley west of Highway 95A and east of the Storey/Lyon county line and are working to get public lands approved for sale to fill in the checkerboard and make TRI II a viable project, said Kris Thompson, project manager of Tahoe Reno Industrial Center (TRI).

The land package included multiple purchases from private landowners. Financial details were not disclosed.

The sale of more than 64,000 acres of land at TRI to Blockchains LLC back in 2017 accelerated development plans for TRI II, Thompson told the NNBW in an interview this month.

“There is no more room for any large industrial development in the Washoe County area,” Thompson said. “We sold out the original 100,000 at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center except for a few non-standard parcels – we are down to about 100 acres.

“We have about a 20,000-acre project area, which by comparison is about the same size as what was built out at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center,” he added. “We could get about 80 to 100 companies there, and we have buyers stacked up with nowhere to go. Because of that saturation, a lot of buyers are going to Utah, Texas, Arizona or New Mexico, which are our biggest competitors for these companies.”

Read the entire article in the NNBW: https://www.nnbw.com/news/2021/dec/14/developers-detail-plans-sprawling-tri-ii-project-f/