FLINT, MI — Twenty-four years after the last Buick LeSabre rolled off the assembly line at Buick City, what could be the most extensive redevelopment in Flint history has started with a critical six months immediately on the horizon.

Earlier this month, local, state and federal officials broke ground on the Flint Commerce Center, the first in what’s expected to be a series of spec buildings in a $300-million industrial park, and a representative of Ashley Capital, the project developer, told a community meeting that it’s preparing for a critical summer of next steps.

“There’s a lot of problems here, no doubt,” Mark Quimby, development manager for Ashley, said during the June 21, meeting. “But there’s a lot of value too. You’ve got rail, you’ve got power, you’ve got water and sewer. You’ve got everything you need.”

Well, not everything.

During the summer and fall, as construction continues on the first 20 acres of the property, Ashley officials are expecting to push for a new brownfield tax credit plan that must be approved by the Flint City Council for the building to continue.

It’s negotiating its next purchase of 273 additional acres of the site, working through a materials management plan that will determine how the redevelopment will be handled with state environmental officials, and planning to start the painstaking process of tearing out building foundations, slabs and utilities left behind by General Motors, which owned the property for decades.

Here’s the working to-do list spelled out by Quimby during the June 21 meeting:

• Agreeing to a materials management plan with the state of Michigan

Quimby said Ashley won’t agree to buy the rest of the Buick City property without agreeing first to a materials management plan with the state and the Revitalizing Auto Communities Environmental Response (RACER) Trust.

RACER is the trust created to manage properties like Buick City, which were abandoned by GM during its bankruptcy more than a decade ago. The trust was tasked with remediating and containing pollution on the property and marketing it for future redevelopment.

The materials management plan is designed to spell out how Ashley will handle any environmental issues it encounters as it redevelops and builds on the property.

Buick City contains soil and groundwater contaminated with various petroleum products, chemicals and metals, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which had initially overseen environmental work on the property.

The site is also one of more than 230 properties in the state where PFAS — a family of man-made “forever chemicals” — has polluted groundwater at elevated levels.

“We’re going to have to deal with the environmental contamination that we disturb … That’s why the materials management plan has to be in place for how we’re going to do it,” Quimby said.

• Closing on the purchase of the remaining Buick City land

Ashley has 273 acres of the 350-acre Buick site under contract for purchase with a tentative closing date scheduled for July 31.

That purchase won’t include two parcels of land where officials for RACER have been working to monitor and contain PFAS contamination — a section of property in the Hamilton Avenue area and a lagoon dug decades ago by GM off James P. Cole Boulevard.

“We want to own it and we want to close” on the purchase, Quimby said. “But there are several things we need before we are willing to close … Obviously, there’s a lot of risk with the site. There’s a lot of pitfalls and what we need is certainty.”

Part of that certainty is tied to the materials management plan and delays in reaching a final agreement with the state and RACER could push back the closing date.

“What we can’t do is move forward without that … We won’t close without that document being approved,” Quimby said. The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy “is working with us. We wish it was going quicker, but it’s a complicated site.”

The company expects to be protected from future liability associated with PFAS and other environmental issues on the Buick property with RACER continuing to hold that responsibility.

Quimby said the purchase of the Hamilton Avenue and lagoon properties are a part of Ashley’s long-term plans but said a sale could take up to a decade to complete as RACER’s remediation work continues in those areas.

• Removing infrastructure left behind by GM

Ashley officials have said GM left Buick City in worse condition than a typical brownfield because while it demolished buildings that made up the complex, it left behind building slabs, foundations and underground utilities.

The company said in October that removing that infrastructure will cost roughly $17 million and it secured funding to complete the work from the state ($8.5 million), the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation ($2 million), and from American Rescue Plan Act funds from the city and Genesee County ($3.25 million from each).

“The site is not buildable in its current condition …,” Quimby said. “All the slabs in place, (GM) left. All the underground infrastructure … all the foundations” remain on site.

Assuming the materials management plan and closing on the sale of additional property occur this summer, Quimby said, Ashley wants to begin that site work this fall.

“We are going to get 150-acres pad-ready” for redevelopment, he said. “We want to have this site positioned so that we’re shovel-ready” for prospective tenants.

• Brownfield tax incentives

Quimby said another requirement for Ashley to continue with its work will involve a brownfield plan and tax incentives to support the redevelopment of the property.

He said he expects the Flint City Council to take up that issue soon — sometime after it resumes meetings in July.

A spokeswoman for the city said on Friday, June 23, that information about brownfield incentives wasn’t immediately available, and Quimby did not discuss the request in detail during the community meeting he spoke at Wednesday.

“Without (the brownfield incentives) we can’t do the job. It just doesn’t work out,” he said.

The Buick City complex on Flint’s north side opened in 1904 and became known as “Buick City” in 1985 after company and union officials launched a plan to bring supplier plants on the property, cutting down on potential supply chain issues.

At its peak, nearly 30,000 GM employees worked at the site.

The last Buick rolled off the plant’s assembly line on June 29, 1999, and the plant’s operations ceased completely in 2010, ending more than 100 years of manufacturing at the site that once produced every Buick built by GM.

Previous efforts to redevelop the property never came to fruition, including a proposal backed by local business officials to convert it into an international rail-to-truck freight facility.

Mahindra Automotive North America, India’s largest SUV manufacturer, was also in talks to build a new factory at Buick City but the company dropped out of a competition to build the next-generation delivery vehicle for the U.S. Postal Service in 2020 and ended its pursuit of the project.

Boosters of the Ashley redevelopment plan have said it has the potential to create more than 3,000 new jobs over time with progress dictated by the demand for light industrial and distribution space.

Read more at The Flint Journal:

Trust that owns Buick City site looks for PFAS solutions in contaminated lagoon

GM left Buick City in worse condition than a ‘normal brownfield,’ buyer says

Buick City redevelopment that will generate $300M local investment breaks ground

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