CONNEAUT – Conneaut City Manager Nick Sanford has worked to bridge the gap between city council and General Electric Aviation to precipitate the demolition of the GE building on Maple Avenue.
Sanford has been in communication with the general counsel for GE Aviation, which is the company that is responsible for all legacy GE sites, as well as with the lead for Ohio EPA’s Brownfield Development and the City of Cleveland’s planning department, which oversaw a major demolition of a 22-acre site that was home to GE’s lamp works two years ago.
“It’s the same contractor for the demolition, same engineering firm that’s proposed to oversee the Conneaut project,” Sanford said. “They essentially follow the same tenets of the Ohio EPA Voluntary Action Program for Brownfield remediation, the only difference being that the City of Cleveland was purchasing the 22-acre site for residential redevelopment. There is no current end user for the Conneaut sites. That being said, GE has obviously shared with me their scope and intent of how they intend to carry on the demolition and remediation of the site. It’s going to be a very long process.”
The demolition and remediation of the property will take a considerable amount of time.
“If they were to start, let’s say now, it would extend into the new year and into the spring, and they would continue monitoring,” Sanford said. “There would be soil excavation, because they need to remove the floor slab. They would be excavating roughly eight feet from underneath the floor slab.”
The property would contaminate-free once the project is completed.
“The sticking point here is the demo permit fee,” Sanford said. “From what I’ve read in neighboring communities, you incentivize demolition if you want to reduce blight. I’m not suggesting that GE is a blighted property, but let’s be honest with ourselves, it has been vacant since 2008. I just went on a diatribe about Carnegie Library, which is now slated for demolition willingly. I think that capping the industrial permit, but adding requirements for bonding in insurance, adding the City of Conneaut as additionally insured is almost an absolute prerequisite for these types of projects.”
Ward 3 Councilman Oakey Emery wants to know that General Electric will be held accountable for the mess it left behind when the plant was closed in 2008.
“I appreciate that, but given a company like General Electric, that’s gone through this whole country devastating communities just like ours by just tearing their plants out and moving them overseas, and then have audacity to not want to be held accountable for pollutants that they leave in the ground that we have to take care of after they promise to clean and fix this property, I want them to be held to the coals on this,” Emery said. “I just look at what they’ve done. They’ve skated as far as taking all these jobs out of the country and then leaving us with the garbage and they don’t want to clean it up.”
“I want the job done thoroughly, done right,” Emery continued. “A multi-billion dollar company that always penny pinches everything. They need to be held accountable for it. I appreciate the work you put into overseeing it.”
Council later approved an ordinance revising the demolition permit fee structure.
The ordinance capped the demolition permit fees on industrial buildings at $20,000 and added bonding and general liability insurance requirements specific to industrial sites requiring 15 percent of project cost, $1 million maximum surety by an Ohio bonding firm, and liability coverage requirements of $1 million per person, $3 million per occurrence, and requires the City of Conneaut be listed as additionally insured.
