Sunday, January 30, 2011
The Vindicator (Youngstown)
Photo
The broken windows of Delphi Packard Electric Plant 8 at Griswold Street and Paige Avenue in Warren. The city has issued a demolition order for this and two other former Delphi plants.
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Delphi Packard Electric, which has reduced its Warren-area hourly work force from 13,500 in 1973 to fewer than 1,000 today, has tried without success to sell off millions of square feet of unused production and office space in recent years.
Its 720,000 square feet on Dana and Griswold streets in Warren have been vacant since 2006. More recently, about two-thirds of 3 million square feet at Delphi’s North River Road complex in Howland and Bazetta Townships have gone idle.
Mark Zigmont, economic development coordinator at the Trumbull County Planning Commission, said it’s hard to re use facilities that large.
“When you have something that big, there’s not that many people interested in it,” he said.
Delphi has resisted demolition of its Dana Street facilities while taking the opposite approach regarding its North River Road plants, seeking demolition bids last year for more than half of its properties there.
Last Wednesday, Delphi sold the Dana Street facilities to a local company that conducts demolitions.
For now, at least part of the North River Road demolition is on hold, while Trumbull County commissioners and Western Reserve Port Authority representatives negotiate with Delphi to buy about 1.2 million square feet, mostly in Bazetta Township.
Trumbull Commissioner Paul Heltzel said the part of the structure the county wants to preserve is still in excellent condition.
The Dana Street buildings, however, have been extensively vandalized and copper has been stolen out of them in recent years, so the city issued a demolition order on them last month.
The possible demise of the Delphi buildings would not be the first time a large Trumbull County industrial building was demolished, but large demolitions have been fairly rare, Zigmont said.
One did occur in the early 1990s, when General Motors took down the former van plant — about 1 million square feet or more — in Lordstown. The concrete flooring was left behind, Zigmont said.
Jim Matash, owner of M&M Demolition of Vienna, said Trumbull County hasn’t seen a lot of demolition work compared with areas such as Cleveland.
Matash believes the realization that Delphi might demolish roughly a million square feet of industrial facilities in Howland Township and another million in Bazetta Township caused officials there to consider the need for their own demolition regulations.
Both townships approved such regulations in December, not long after a private meeting in the Trumbull County Administration Building among officials from township, county, state and federal governments.
Heltzel and Howland Township Administrator Darlene St. George said the meeting was necessary so that officials could share information about the possible North River Road demolition.
“They were behind,” Matash said of the townships’ demolition rules. “A lot of townships that have a lot of demolitions have already enacted those rules.”
Matash included Warren on the list of places that have experience with demolition and stricter demolition rules.
Warren’s demolition rules show that demolition in the city can be expensive. In addition to removal of buildings, water tanks and the like, a Warren demolition also requires removal of sidewalks, floors, driveways, concrete slabs and asphalt.
Chris Taneyhill, building inspector, said the city requires the concrete slabs and parking lots to be removed because those items can create drainage problems if left behind.
Howland’s new demolition regulations, approved Dec. 8, cover the basic demolition of buildings and say that the township may also require removal of paved areas, slabs, lighting, signs and fencing.
Some of those can be left behind “if the owner of the demolition site demonstrates that redevelopment of the demolition site is imminent” and those things are needed by the next owner.
Bazetta Township’s demolition resolution, approved 2-0 on Dec. 28, requires environmental assessments of the property before demolition of a commercial structure. They also require removal of all concrete and return of the property to “an agriculturally friendly condition or to a condition suitable for new construction to occur, as decided on a case-by-case basis, after the appropriate site inspection and review by the Zoning Inspector and Commission.”
Matash said he believes the new demolition regulations might add as much as $1 million of additional cost to a $4 million to $5 million demolition.
Howland Township’s St. George and other Howland and Bazetta township officials said the regulations were not drawn up just in response to news that Delphi might demolish millions of square feet.
Howland has been fortunate over the years to have very little demolition of its industrial structures, but with the downturn in the economy, more demolitions have occurred, especially among homes, St. George said.
When owners demolished homes in the past, the township had almost no say, with the county building inspection department issuing the demolition permit and inspecting the work.
“We would not have been made aware of it in advance,” St. George said of any demolitions. Afterward, there were sometimes concrete slabs or driveways left behind.
“This is a way for us to make sure it is being done right,” St. George said. The regulations include a $50 fee for each residential demolition and a $100 fee for each commercial or industrial demolition.
The rules are meant to prevent taxpayers from footing the bill for a mess left behind by a company that shuts down.
Ted Webb, Bazetta zoning commission member, said the township has also had problems with demolitions carried out incorrectly.
As for an environmental assessment, Webb said the township essentially is requiring the same thing the Environmental Protection Agency requires.
However, Suzanne Prusnek, environmental specialist with the Division of Hazardous Waste Management in the EPA’s Twinsburg office, and EPA spokesman Mike Settles said the EPA would not require Delphi to conduct an environmental assessment or remove concrete or asphalt as part of demolition.
Prus nek said she’s not aware of any other federal or state agency that would require that work.
Other regulations are triggered when an entire facility is demolished, but those would not apply for the North River Road plant because part of it will remain open, Prusnek said.
Part of Prusnek’s job for more than a decade has been to monitor the North River Road site and work with the company to abate environmental concerns as they arose. Because of that, she believes any environmental problems have been addressed already.
“In 10 or 11 years, [Delphi] has been responsive to all of my requests, and I’m pretty strict,” Prusnek said.
The only reason the soil, concrete or asphalt would require testing or removal would be “if Delphi did its own sampling and found a problem. Then OEPA would follow up,” she said.
The plant operates under the strictest standards the EPA has — called a Part D permit. Only 40 to 50 companies in the state are licensed under Part D rules.
Prusnek said the main agency with responsibility for commercial or industrial demolitions in Trumbull County is the Mahoning Trumbull Air Pollution Control Agency, which works under a contract with the EPA. It is housed in the Youngstown Health Department offices.
Tara Cioffi, the agency’s sanitarian, said asbestos abatement and other air-quality issues are her agency’s main concerns. Soil contamination and removal of concrete or asphalt, for example, are not her agency’s concern, she said.
Mike Sliwinski, Trumbull County’s chief building official, said his building inspection department doesn’t have specific demolition requirements that govern removal of concrete slabs, driveways or parking lots.
His department’s role in demolitions is to make sure they are done safely and correctly. The owner of a building being demolished takes out a permit; the department reviews it, and the department advises the owner on issues such as removal of utilities or septic systems, Sliwinski said.
Taneyhill said one recent Warren commercial demolition — removal of the Parkman Road Shopping Center at Parkman and North Leavitt roads — didn’t involve removal of the parking lot. The lot was left behind because the ownership was traced to a corporation, Parkhurst Mall Corp., and the city couldn’t get the corporation to pay, Taneyhill said.
The city eventually paid about $78,000 at its cost to demolish the structure because the building had become a gathering spot for teens. Then the city placed a lien on the property as a way of possibly getting reimbursed for the $78,000, Taneyhill said.
As for Delphi, Rachelle Valdez, Delphi’s director of communications, said the company is “disappointed” that Bazetta and Howland townships have made demolition more expensive, saying their actions don’t “bode well” for Delphi “or future companies in that area.”
The rules might force Delphi to remove concrete floors and compacted soil under the facilities that a future company would most likely find beneficial, Valdez said.
Zigmont, the county economic development coordinator, agrees that concrete floors, many of them 6 inches thick, could be of value to the next company wanting to use a building.
“If it’s already there, it might be worth a couple bucks to you,” he said of another company.