A new customs pre-clearing system at a suburban Phoenix, Arizona, airport is expected to reduce international shipping times to Mexico.

The SkyBridge Arizona project will bring Mexican customs officials to the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, where they will pre-clear packages, allowing them to be delivered directly to recipients in Mexico.

Officials say the system will prevent long waits faced by online shoppers in Mexico as items clear customs.

Bill Jabjiniak, director of economic development for the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, told the border issues newspaper Border Report that the system will streamline air shipping between the United States and Mexico and make Gateway Airport an even more important hub.

“This includes companies like Amazon and Ebay but also companies and manufacturers that are looking to do business in Mexico,” he said. “It’ll fast-track shipments to their final destinations and create a secure delivery system because customs will be tracking those packages.”

Work will begin on SkyBridge Arizona in October. According to Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, the 350-acre project will cost US $230 million, and will include two million square feet of warehouse space and one million square feet of offices. Mesa officials say the project will create as many as 17,000 jobs.

Jabjiniak said that SkyBridge is projected to control 5% of the southwest’s exports to Mexico by 2025, while Governor Ducey said that cargo flights out of Gateway Airport will number 10,000 a year by 2036.

SkyBridge is centered on an expansion of Unified Cargo Processing, a collaborative program between U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and Mexico’s federal tax authority (SAT) which brings SAT officials to the United States to pre-clear shipments to Mexico. The first Unified Cargo Processing pilot program started in 2016 in Nogales, Arizona.

Source: Border Report (en), AZ Big Media (en)