Credit: Erich Martin/LevittownNow.com
The vacant Bucks County Courier Times building along Route 13 in Tullytown has a potential new use.
New Jersey-based Pinnacle Freight CEO Michael Ravallo said this week that he is aiming to purchase the roughly 9-acre property and move his company from the Garden State to Bucks County.
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Pinnacle Freight has reached an agreement to purchase the building for an unannounced price, Attorney Ed Murphy said.
The Gatehouse Media-owned property that has been empty since earlier this year had been listed at $2.4 million.
Plans for the site would still need to be submitted and approved by planners and Council.
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Ravallo told Tullytown Borough Council that he would plan to remove about 18,000-square-feet of the building closer to Levittown Parkway and expand the parking area on the other side of the building. He also is eying putting a fence around the facility.
Pinnacle Freight collects shipments from businesses in Bucks County and New Jersey using 10 to 15 trucks. Under the plan, the shipments would be brought to the Tullytown building and stored a day or two until they could be loaded onto longhaul trailers and moved across the nation, Ravallo said.
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The company does not haul hazardous materials or store them, Ravallo said.
When asked by Council, Ravallo said Pinnacle Freight would keep their truck traffic to Route 13 and would not send trucks through residential areas.
The company would have no more than 40 to 50 trailers at the facility at one time.
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Pinnacle Freight employs about 100 employees.
The cira-1959 building was once where the newspaper was printed daily. That changed in the early 2000s when the Bucks County Courier Times and its sister papers began being produced at a new facility on Geoffrey Road in Falls Township. Following the sale of Calkins Media to Gatehouse Media in 2017, the newspaper cut staff and downsized to a new office in Middletown this year.
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A former newspaper distribution warehouse next to the Bucks County Courier Times building was sold previously to an company and is not part of the Pinnacle Freight proposal.
