SALINA — The Salina Industrial PowerPark could be in line for more than $31 million in environmental-cleanup activities in the coming years as a result of the General Motors bankruptcy.
The PowerPark is a former General Motors manufacturing site that shut down in 1993. It was redeveloped as an industrial park in 2006 and is about 60 percent leased.
The 810,000-square-foot site is home to 15 businesses, including Bitzer Scroll Inc., a manufacturer of air conditioning and refrigeration compressors; Carpenter Industries, Inc., which performs abrasive blasting, welding and fabrication; and Klein Steel Service, a steel and metals warehouse.
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The property is now owned by the RACER Trust. The trust was created in March 2011 by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court as part of GM’s bankruptcy, which was filed in 2009.
RACER is working with Pyramid Brokerage of DeWitt, which serves as property manager, to attract tenants. The ultimate goal is to find a new owner for the site.
As part of the agreement establishing the trust, cleanup budgets were outlined for many of the properties. The Salina site’s budget totals more than $31.1 million, according to the trust.
The property is contaminated with materials including toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene, among other things. Contaminated areas range throughout the property, according to RACER.
The cleanup budget will fund both ongoing and future work, according to the trust. Previous owners of the facility, including GM, undertook cleanup projects in years past that require continuing upkeep.
One project involved a paint-thinner spill at an underground storage-tank area, according to RACER. The trust still maintains groundwater-recovery trenches used to remediate that spill.
The trust’s mission is to clean up and spark redevelopment at facilities shut down as a result of GM’s reorganization.
The site in Salina and one in Detroit are different from all of the trust’s other properties, says Bruce Rasher, RACER’s redevelopment manager. Those properties had already been repurposed and redeveloped to some degree before the GM bankruptcy.
“We’re attempting to perpetuate the redevelopment that was started before the bankruptcy,” Rasher says of the Salina site. “We’re striving to maintain the property as a valuable asset for the community.”
When it was formed, the trust owned a total of 44 million square feet of industrial space in 66 buildings. The properties are spread across 14 states, mainly in the Midwest and Northeast.
Unlike Salina, most of the sites closed as a direct result of the GM bankruptcy. They include both properties with buildings and other amenities in place and vacant industrial land, Rasher says.
The trust owned a total of 89 properties when it formed. It recently reached agreement to sell one of those properties, the former GM Mansfield-Ontario Stamping Plant in Ontario, Ohio, to the Brownfield Communities Development Co.
Contact Tampone at ktampone@cnybj.com
