Attorney General: Connersville Cleanup Paves Way for New Manufacturer
IDEM Landfill Trust-Fund Surplus to Help City Remediate Ford-Visteon Site for Industrial Redevelopment
Attorney General Zoeller and Carbon's Chairman and CEO, William Santana Li, take questions at press conference.
CONNERSVILLE, IN – The State of Indiana has acted to transfer $500,000 left over from the cleanup of a landfill that the City of Connersville can use to rehabilitate the former Ford-Visteon industrial site — the location where a new employer intends to open a large manufacturing facility that could create more than 1,000 jobs.
The move by the Indiana Attorney General’s Office and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management to release remaining funds to city government marks the final action in a consent decree reached nearly eight years ago that required remediation of the old Connersville city landfill.
Of the more than $862,000 remaining in the consent decree’s trust fund, the City now can use up to $500,000 to redevelop the former Visteon Systems LLC facility at 4747 Western Avenue, now known as 1 Carbon Motors Drive in Connersville.
“Remediation of this industrial site protects the environment and once again makes the site suitable for production and jobs expected to come to the State of Indiana and the City of Connersville,” Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller said today. “The City has gone the extra mile to assume responsibility for the Ford-Visteon site, so I am pleased that the surplus landfill funds are available to help the city secure a future with Carbon Motors.”
In November, the City entered into an agreement with Visteon to purchase the 183-acre, 1.8-million-square-foot industrial site after Visteon in May sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. The City will be able to apply the $500,000 toward remediating the industrial contamination from the old Visteon site where Ford Motor Company once operated. Total cost of the cleanup is estimated at approximately $4.03 million.
In July, Carbon Motors Corporation announced it had selected the former Ford-Visteon site as the location of its planned new headquarters, engineering, sales, service training and production facility to manufacture its law enforcement patrol vehicle, the Carbon E7. The company has announced the production facility would create 1,550 new jobs.
“As the Mayor and on behalf of the City of Connersville, we are excited that Carbon Motors Corporation is coming to Connersville, and we are extremely grateful to the State of Indiana and the Attorney General for the part they have played in this endeavor. This has been a great year for the hopes and morale of Connersville people,” Mayor Leonard Urban said.
“Today’s announcement is yet another big step forward and ample evidence of the strong cooperation between local and state authorities to create thousands of new jobs in an area experiencing greater than a 16 percent unemployment rate,” said William Santana Li, chairman and chief executive officer of Carbon Motors Corporation.
In 2001, in response to industrial wastes being disposed of in the Connersville city landfill, IDEM brought two lawsuits against the polluters responsible. Consent decrees reached at the time resulted in financial settlements paid into a trust fund created to remedy environmental problems at the landfill. The City in 2002 entered into a separate consent decree with IDEM, paid $600,000 into the fund and assumed responsibility for long-term maintenance and improvements of the landfill.
Since then, IDEM used the settlement trust fund to install a cap over the landfill and a reinforced-earth barrier, called a Gabion, between the landfill and the Whitewater River. Having weathered several seasons, the landfill has stabilized, with groundwater tests showing no migration of contamination from the site.
The City recently sought to be released from the earlier conditions of the consent decree so it can redevelop the capped surface over the landfill into a city park. The City will assume future costs of maintenance of the Gabion and groundwater monitoring, under the new agreement.
This month, the Attorney General’s Office and IDEM filed an amendment to the consent decree in U.S. District Court that will release remaining money in the trust fund to the City. Of that, the City may use $500,000 to defray costs of the remediation of the former Ford-Visteon site. As part of its economic-development plan, Connersville intends to sell or lease the property to an industrial prospect that will conduct manufacturing and provide jobs at the facility.
Resolving latent environmental issues at the vacant Ford-Visteon facility are a factor in obtaining state tax credits for the Carbon Motors project.
In August, Carbon Motors filed its application to secure as financing for the project a $310 million federal loan from the U.S. Department of Energy, under the federal Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Incentive Program.
“IDEM and the Environmental section of the Attorney General’s Office have worked diligently over the past eight years to ensure that environmental laws are followed. The success of that earlier agreement has translated into this public-private partnership that now offers great potential to the workforce of Fayette County and the surrounding area,” Zoeller said.
Settlement funds remaining beyond the $500,000 applied to the cleanup and trustee costs can be used by Connersville to improve the former landfill site that the City intends to redevelop into a park, under the agreement with the Attorney General’s office and IDEM.
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