Along the SH 114 corridor in Southlake lies major corporations such as Verizon Wireless and Sabre. Another business will soon join the corridor as plans for TD Ameritrade’s regional campus were approved at the April 19 Southlake City Council meeting.

“This is the greatest gift the city has received,” Southlake Mayor Laura Hill said. “They are going to build a high-quality campus and quality invites quality. I think we are going to reap the benefits from this for years.”

The 355,000-square-foot building will be located at 1051 W. Kirkwood Blvd. and consist of a three-story office building and a five-level parking garage on 78 acres.

Construction is expected to begin this spring and be complete in the fall of 2017.

Kim Hillyer, director of communications and public affairs for TD Ameritrade, said the new campus will consolidate Ameritrade’s call center, technology and operations staff from two office buildings in Fort Worth.

“We have been in Fort Worth since 1999 in our location off of Alliance Gateway [Freeway], and that location is now at capacity, bursting at the seams,” she said. “So we were looking for a location that we could expand and build and thought the Southlake location was perfect. The location is ideal because of its access to [SH] 114, and it moves us a little bit closer to Dallas, which helps us from a recruiting standpoint.”

Approximately 1,200 employees will make the move to the new campus, but the building can accommodate up to 2,000 associates.

Because the campus is bringing more than 1,000 employees to an area where traffic is already congested, the new campus saw opposition at the council meeting from residents living in the Kirkwood Hollow neighborhood who say that their neighborhood is seeing more and more corporate employees congesting the roads to avoid traffic on SH 114. One neighborhood resident, Doug Harsy, filed an appeal against the campus, but he said it was denied because it was not specific enough. He has since filed again.

“We are very disappointed that the city of Southlake has chosen to allow TD Ameritrade to utilize the Kirkwood Hollow neighborhood as a major entrance,” he said. “We find this unsafe for our community, and their plan lacks compassion to be a good neighbor to the Southlake citizens. It is very unfortunate that TD Ameritrade has chosen to route their employee traffic through our neighborhood rather than utilize [SH] 114 frontage as their employee access point.”

Hill said traffic will continue to be something that the city examines.

Hill said in October that the Texas Department of Transportation will begin a project on SH 114 and SH 170 that will help alleviate traffic.

“One of the things I tried to express to the citizens who have legitimate concerns is that right now because the traffic is backing up on [SH] 114 as it moves west into Trophy Club, people are using those new phone apps like Waze, and they are being told to go through neighborhoods and on our side streets,” she said. “A lot of that traffic is going to go away once the 114/170 project is finished.”

Hill said the project is expected to be complete when the campus opens.