The night before a team of Target Corp. executives was about take off from Minneapolis to scout potential locations in Arizona and California to build a fulfillment center for its burgeoning online business, they received a telephone call from Lee Smith and Julie Sapp in business development at Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities (TREO), asking what they needed to do to land the deal for Tucson.

Jim Theusch, senior corporate real estate manager for Target, said the team "wanted to meet community leadership dedicated to making this a reality."

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They made their trip to Tucson – a secret one under the code name Project Falcon – and met local officials. As the executive group was at the airport getting ready to leave, Theusch said Tucson Mayor Bob Walkup told him "failure is not an option, this project will become a reality."

"We got on the plane to leave and I think by the time we got to the end of the runway, we were pretty sure of our decision," Theusch said.

As a result, officials of Target, landowner Diamond Ventures, commercial real estate firm CB Richard Ellis, TREO and elected officials from Tucson, Pima County, Oro Valley, Marana and Sahuarita joined in the official groundbreaking ceremony Jan. 10 on what will be a 975,000 square-foot fulfillment center for Target.com. But dirt was already flying at the 130-acre site on Rita Road just north of Interstate 10.

In his remarks at the groundbreaking, Pima County Supervisor Ray Carroll insisted local officials need to make certain they do what they can to make sure the Target facility gets open and running on time. Noting that he intends to be in Minneapolis this summer for the Republican convention, Carroll said he’s planning to stop in at Target headquarters to make sure everything is progressing as scheduled.

The area on the southeast where the Target facility is under construction has become a center of business activity. Target’s neighbors include Raytheon, IBM and Citi, among others, across the street in the University of Arizona Science and Technology Park and La Costeña Foods’ newly opened Arizona Canning Co. operation is next door.

The goal is for Target to have the state-of-the-art fulfillment center up and running in time to handle the crush of holiday orders in 2009. The Tucson facility will be Target’s second such facility, after one it has in Woodbury, Minn. Theusch said the new Tucson operation will also cut down on the company’s need to use third-party fulfillment centers.

Target’s online business was projected to gross $1 billion in 2007.

Although company officials aren’t releasing employment statistics, the center will be able to have about 500 regular employees that could be supplemented with up to 400 additional temporary employees at peak times. At that rate, those employees combined with the estimated 1,200 employees working at Target’s eight area retail stores, would make the company the 16th largest private employer in the Tucson region.

Joe Snell, president and CEO of TREO, said Target’s decision is already prompting inquiries from other companies.

"We’re getting calls from people who are wondering ‘what does Target know that we don’t know’," Snell said.

That’s important, he said, as the Tucson region redirects its economic development focus on getting the right kind of jobs to come here. One of TREO’s focuses is developing this as a logistics center and Target is helping to jumpstart that, Snell said.

Directly related to that, he noted, was the decision announced last month by Stanley Inc. to open a passport production facility in Tucson that it hopes to have running by this summer.