Southeast Toyota Vehicle Processing Center, Blount Island, Jacksonville

Southeast Toyota Distributors spent more than five decades processing cars at Jacksonville’s Talleyrand Marine Terminal. Its new home is an 88-acre campus at JAXPORT’s Blount Island Marine Terminal, built by JE Dunn Construction for $145 million and designed by Jacksonville-based kasper architects + associates. On Oct. 14, 2026, the project took an Award of Merit in the manufacturing category of ENR’s Texas & Southeast Best Projects.

It’s a processing plant, not a parking lot. New Toyotas bound for roughly 177 dealers in Florida, Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas come through here for accessory installation, inspection and prep before they go out.

Project Scope

The anchor is a 272,000-square-foot accessory installation building that also holds offices, a kitchen, a cafeteria, locker rooms and a fitness center. Around it are an operations building, a security gatehouse, a three-lane car wash, a fuel island, a body shop, EV charging and a rail connection, plus about 400,000 square feet of paved staging. Building area tops 380,000 square feet. Sources split on the count: ENR lists nine buildings, local reporting says seven.

Blount Island’s soils were the main engineering problem. ETM Civil Engineering handled civil design, and the team installed more than 4,500 controlled modulus columns to carry buildings and paving. Sitework and foundation packages were fast-tracked. Because the job sat inside a secure marine terminal, JE Dunn set up a dedicated construction gate and perimeter so workers didn’t need TWIC cards.

Foundation work started in August 2023 and vertical construction in July 2024. Vehicle processing began in October 2025, and the rail spur, the final construction piece, was done by early February 2026. The public ribbon cutting came April 22.

Why It Matters

Capacity is up to 4,000 vehicles a week, about 6% more than Talleyrand, and roughly 400 people work on site. Today the cars arrive by rail and truck from U.S. plants. Southeast Toyota plans to add ocean shipments from Asia, Europe and Mexico by 2027, which is the real reason to sit on a deepwater terminal.

The port did well out of the move. JAXPORT signed a 25-year lease on the 88 acres with three five-year renewal options and values the lease and upgrades at $210 million over 40 years. It then re-leased the vacated Talleyrand acreage to Enstructure under a 30-year, $136.6 million agreement. One relocation filled two terminals.

The headline cost depends on who’s counting. ENR and the Jacksonville Daily Record use $145 million, while a regional workforce board’s ribbon-cutting writeup cited a $170 million operation. A $19.78 million Florida DOT grant covered part of the bill.

Project Team & Details