Sébastien Eugène, Mayor of Château-Thierry and President of the Château-Thierry Region Agglomeration Community

Sébastien Eugène: Cities with between 3,500 and 25,000 inhabitants are ultimately given little place in public debate. We often talk about major metropolitan areas and rural municipalities, but rarely about municipalities such as Château-Thierry, with its 15,000 inhabitants. The APVF defends our interests, carries our voice to the government and public authorities, and gives us the information we need, because our issues are not those of large cities or small villages.

We are somewhere in between, with farmland—particularly vineyards, as culturally we are part of Champagne—urbanized areas, forests, industrial or commercial zones, logistics activities…

SE: Just 85 kilometers from Paris, with access to the A4 highway and rail service, Château-Thierry is highly valued by logistics operators. Eighty hectares of its total area (1,700 ha) are currently devoted to logistics activities, and we expect to allocate another 40 hectares in the coming years. These will likely be the last logistics proposals we accept within the municipality.

SE: Because they take up space! In a small city like Château-Thierry, these 120 hectares already account for a significant share of our available land, which is all the more valuable in the era of the Zero Net Artificialization (ZAN) policy. In addition, the jobs created are generally low-skilled. In fact, the logistics companies located in our municipality have difficulty recruiting locally… And there is a palpable degree of public fatigue with logistics, which is already very much present.

SE: Employment is the main argument. A 20-hectare site creates around 400 jobs. For an agglomeration of 15,000 inhabitants, that is significant. There is also the tax revenue, which is far from negligible. Within the Château-Thierry Region Agglomeration Community, some municipalities reduce the development tax from 4% to 1% to make a project happen, knowing that property tax will then be collected every year. The arrival of these new activities can also help energize the local businesses that sustain the municipality.

SE: As I have already said, the number of jobs created per hectare is the main issue. In the Château-Thierry Region Agglomeration Community area, logistics employment accounts for 5.5% of all jobs. But the question of the qualifications required for these jobs is now also arising. We are only at the very beginning, but we are now working closely with existing facilities to upgrade the occupations and the level of technical expertise required on site. This could involve, for example, integrating part of the production process at the logistics site. Landscape integration is also a topic systematically raised in meetings. That said, we do not have a specific set of requirements or dedicated regulations. It is handled mainly through discussions with project developers, with plans improved iteratively through back-and-forth exchanges—sometimes many of them. The landscape guide published by Afilog could help us, as it would also enable us to see what is being done elsewhere.

For local residents, the questions mainly concern building height and proximity to homes… But the next facilities are far enough away that there is no opposition to the projects.

SE: For one of the forthcoming projects on the 40 hectares, we had to build new road infrastructure, such as a new access road. Even though the facility will be located close to the highway, adapting the road network was necessary. The cost is estimated at around €1 million, which we passed on in the land sale price.

SE: We avoid at all costs thinking at the scale of a single municipality, preferring to consider the entire agglomeration so as to maintain consistency and distribute activities across the whole area. Consistency also means not pushing activities into areas without suitable infrastructure—that would make no sense! In keeping with this approach, we are therefore increasingly putting project planning in place.