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December 21, 2006
LORAIN, OH — Two manufacturing companies could set up shop at the former Ford Motor Co. plant on Baumhart Road before the end of 2007 — bringing with them 300 or more new jobs, officials announced Wednesday.
Stuart Lichter, president of Industrial Realty Group, which bought the former Lorain Assembly Plant for $2.5 million Monday, said he hopes to transform the abandoned site and its 250 acres into an industrial park featuring as many as eight manufacturing and distribution companies. If those plans are realized, that could mean as many as 2,000 new jobs for Lorain County, Lichter said.
IRG already is working with two manufacturing companies that it hopes will move to the site. He wouldn’t name them, but said one is from Lorain County and the second is from another state. The move would enable the Lorain County company, which employs 200 people, to expand, Lorain Mayor Craig Foltin said.
Lichter said the plan is for both of the companies to move to the site sometime after June, when demolition crews are to be finished tearing down roughly one third of a million square feet of enclosed space on the property, Lichter said.
In all, 13 buildings are clustered on the property, but two of them — the assembly plant and the paint shop — are the largest. The plans call for tearing down a middle group of buildings and having the Lorain County company operating from the southern end of the cluster and the out-of-state company on the northern end.
Foltin, Lichter and Lichter’s investment partner, Christopher Semarjian, senior vice president of NAI Daus, a Cleveland development firm, all appeared at the press conference to talk about the company’s purchase of the plant, which occurred about a year after Ford shifted production of the Econoline van to its Avon Lake plant and shuttered the building.
Foltin couldn’t say enough about the company’s efforts.
“We could not have officially proclaimed Lorain’s renaissance with the Ford plant sitting vacant,” Foltin told a room packed with city and county officials at Lorain City Hall.
The purchase actually was expected to close sooner, but got bogged down as the responsibility for underground environmental issues at the site was resolved. IRG will assume any liability for the property — the problems of which Lichter would not disclose other than to say that they do not present a health risk to residents.
Lichter said the environmental issues were part of the reason the $2.5 million sale price was well short of the county auditor’s appraised value of $28 million for the plant, but he also noted that such appraisals tend to be inflated because the value is set when the plants are operational.
But Lorain County Auditor Mark Stewart said the $28 million already was a reduction to reflect the plant’s closing — the plant had been valued at $56 million in 2003.
The low sale price means the county likely will lose money.
The county receives $4 for every $1,000 on each sale in conveyance fees. With the $2.5 million price tag, the county is slated to get around $9,600. If the plant had been sold for the appraised value, the county would have received around $112,000. Annually, the county receives around $5.1 million in conveyance fees.
Stewart said his office has requested additional documents from IRG about the sale to see if there were any mitigating circumstances that reduced the price. But he downplayed the request, saying his office routinely investigates property sales that vary from the appraised value, and that the deal can’t be blocked, he said.
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