(Daily News File/Andrew J. Breig)

Ohio-based tire manufacturer Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. will lease a 1 million-square-foot warehouse in Gateway Global Logistics Center in Marshall County that Newport, California-based Panattoni Development Co. broke ground on Wednesday, Feb. 7. 

Colliers International’s Preston Thomas represented Cooper Tire in the build-to-suit deal, while Jim Mercer of CBRE represented Panattoni in the lease.

Alston Construction Inc. will be the facility’s general contractor, while Pickering Firm will handle the design work. An affiliate of Gramercy Property Trust, GPT Norfolk Southern Way Owner LLC is funding the project.

Upon completion, the site, which has room for an additional 400,000 square feet, will be Cooper Tire’s largest distribution facility in the United States.

Panattoni has also commenced vertical construction on a 554,040-square-foot speculative building with the capability to expand to 1.56 million square feet. An additional 707,000-square-foot building pad on an adjacent site at Gateway Global is nearing completion and will soon be available for vertical speculative development.

“The Cooper project and adjacent new speculative building bring the total development activity at GGLC to 6 million square feet in the past three and a half years,” Panattoni’s regional partner Whitfield Hamilton said in a release.

“The Cooper Tire and speculative building projects begin the fourth phase of development at GGLC, adjacent to the newly opened Highway 72 flyover, with additional building pads, site work and infrastructure in place for the next 4.5 million square feet of development beyond these current buildings.”

Whitfield also said Panattoni’s 1.5 million-square-foot graded building pad is the largest and only completed pad of its size in the country.