City secures Visteon cleanup funds

Wednesday, December 23, 2009 2:14 AM EST

After a day of multiple litigation on Monday, Indiana’s attorney general said he was glad to see smiling faces Tuesday in Connersville.

Attorney General Greg Zoeller announced that the city of Connersville and his office had reached an agreement to aid in the funding of the environmental clean-up at the vacant Visteon building. The action should help Carbon Motors move in more quickly.

Zoeller told local officials, residents and the community through City TV Channel 3 during a City Hall press conference that the city of Connersville would be able to use $500,000 on the Visteon clean-up of the $862,222 that remains in the trust fund that was designated for Smalley’s Lake.

The Smalley’s site is the former Connersville dump.

An agreement to permit the use of the funds was signed on Dec. 3 by a U.S. district judge, Thomas Easterly, commissioner of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, and Mayor Leonard Urban.

“This is a long process and is an example of local, county and state working collaboratively with each other, which is not always the case, along with private industry,” Zoeller said.

The city will be able to apply the $500,000 from that trust fund toward remediating the industrial contamination from the vacant Visteon site.

The city of Connersville had paid $600,000 into the trust fund in 2002 in response to two lawsuits filed by the attorney general’s office in 2001 because of industrial wastes being disposed of in the landfill at Smalley’s Lake. The city agreed to be responsible for future maintenance of the site at that time, according to a press release from Zoeller’s office.

The trustee of the landfill remediation funds has installed a cap over the landfill and built a reinforced-earth barrier between the landfill and the Whitewater River. The landfill has stabilized and groundwater tests have shown no migration of contamination from the site.

The total cost of the clean-up at the vacant Visteon site is estimated to be $4.03 million. An announcement of funding for that amount is expected to be made public soon.

“This process has been going on since (Visteon’s) bankruptcy was filed (May 28),” the attorney general said. “When we saw that these funds could be used not only for the clean-up but also to prepare the site, I think it does really help everyone. I think it’s one of the most collaborative efforts I’ve seen where the city, county and state came together for a clean-up where everyone is pretty satisfied with it as well as helping create infrastructure for new companies and the jobs it will bring.”

“This is one of the wonderful things working with the state of Indiana, the attorney general and certainly Governor Daniels,” said William Santana Li, chairman and CEO of Carbon Motors. “They’ve been very creative in piecing together the pieces of the puzzle to make this work. This is an example of the city, state and county working together collaboratively to create new American jobs of national importance. The next step is for the federal authorities to do the same.”

Li was speaking of the U.S. Department of Energy that is reviewing a $310 million loan application from Carbon Motors under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Incentive Program.

Unbeknownst to an Indianapolis television cameraman who asked what happened if the loan is not approved, Li responded by saying the company does not take “no” for an answer.

“Failure is not an option,” he said. “We have 840,000 first responders across the country counting on us. We have 10,000 people in Connersville counting on us. It’s of national importance that we execute this. We have to figure a way around obstacles and then hit the accelerator.”

Mayor Leonard Urban thanked city attorney Jon Baker for his efforts in working with state officials to hash out the plan to use the funds for the clean-up.

Urban said the city is still waiting to take control of the building from Visteon.

While the U.S. District Bankruptcy Court for Delaware has agreed to transfer title of the building for $500 to the city of Connersville, the district judge has not signed the paperwork.