MILL DEMOLITION RAISES IRE IN STOTTVILLE


Mike McCagg
ccSCOOP News

07-14-11 - Contractors are once again demolishing pieces of Columbia County’s milling history and officials know little – if anything – about who is doing the work, how or whether it should be regulated.

The demolition this week of the former L&B Furniture and Ferris mill in Stottville – and an accompanying eight-story water tower on Town Garage Road – has a local resident seeing red. The mill and water tower is highly visible from County Route 20 – a main thoroughfare connecting State Route 9 with State Route 66.

The resident on Wednesday filed a complaint with the state Department of Environmental Conservation and is seeking an immediate action to halt the further demolition of the mill.

The resident, who declines to be named, said he had plans to make the mill an international destination that would create jobs and bolster the county’s tourism industry.

Sergei Dubois, a spokesman for the developer, said plans were being designed to create an “international research center in the abandoned factory” that would have employed “a dozen people” and “brought people from across the globe” to the tiny hamlet.

Additionally, Dubois said a complimentary war memorial was being looked at for the site, which once housed several factories and surrounded on three sides by the Claverack Creek.

Dubois questioned who is allowing the demolition work on the factories and water tower, who is regulating the work and what steps are being taken to control the pollution run-off into the creek which dumps into the Hudson River a few miles downstream.

He also asked what permits – if any – had been issued to the contractors for the demolition work.

Town Supervisor Leo Pulcher told ccSCOOP that he was aware of the plans for war memorial on the site but only in the conceptual format. Additionally, he said, the developer had never mentioned plans to him for the research center. Pulcher said he does not know who is conducting the demolition work and stated that no permits for the work had been issued.

However, he said, he would not want to interfere with the work because of liability questions for the cleanup of the site, which are believed to be heavily polluted from decades of use as an industrial center for the town and county.

“What happens if we go in there and stop them? Does the state now say to the town you are responsible for the site and we are stuck paying one, two, five million dollars to clean it up?,” Pulcher said.

Adding to the dilemma is the fact that ownership of the property has been a quandary for nearly two decades.
Pulcher said a “handshake agreement” was reached several years ago with a pair of contractors to remove several former L & B Furniture and AD Julliard mills in the town that had been vacant since the 1980s. Additionally, he said, discussions had been undertaken with those contractors – whose name he does not recall – and the county attorney’s office to start the process to turn the property over to contractors once the demolition and remediation work had been completed.

However, he said, “they (the contractors) never got back to us with the information the attorney requested.”

In a 2009 ccSCOOP article, Pulcher identified the contractors as Travis Jameson and Ron Guilder. He stated this week he doesn’t know if the same men are doing the current demolition work. Jameson and Guilder are not listed in the telephone book and neither Town Clerk Sandra Novak nor Code Enforcement Officer Mario Ferrari has contact information for the contractors to learn more about those plans.

Turning the property over to the contractors would have meant the county would have to undertake a tax foreclosure preceding on the mills and land, which back taxes are reportedly owed on for more than a decade.

A 1994 blaze in one of the mills – located on Town Garage Road next to the mills being razed now - raised questions about the ownership of all of the properties, since property tax bills had been piling up unpaid and no one stepped forward after the fire to claim ownership and clean up the mess.

The topic was broached in the mid- and late-1990s repeatedly by the county Board of Supervisors as to what to do with the land. Eventually, the board decided to remove the land from the tax rolls, but not take title to it because of potential pollution on the property caused by what is suspected to have been years of chemicals released into the ground and into creek.

The Town Board likewise refused to take ownership of the land and L&B Industries, which was an offshoot of L&B Furniture – reportedly denied ownership of the land.

Removing the land and mills from the tax rolls eliminated the county’s responsibility to reimburse the school district for school taxes on the property that could not be collected.

Pulcher said he doesn’t know if the current demolition work has been authorized by the private owners of the mill and water tower or even if the owners would actually admit to owning the property.

The contractors “come in, work for a few weeks, and disappear again,” Pulcher said. “And then out of the blue they reappear months or years later.”

A hulking former mill on Chester Avenue was demolished a couple years ago by the contractors and two other mills on Town Garage Road have subsequently been held leveled.

The town resident noted that the mills is the “last heritage site in Stockport” and should have been saved because of its place in history as one of the early industrial centers in the county.

He also claimed that by allowing the salvage work on the site, the town and county has opened itself up to be held liable for millions of dollars of remediation expenses for the suspected pollutants.

“If there were buildings on it, then they were OK. Once those buildings are gone, then it can become a superfund site,” the resident alleged.

“Clearly, the guys destroying these buildings are just out to get a few dollars in cash and leave the town with an environmental disaster and tens of millions of dollars worth of trouble. Visually, there will be nothing charming or quaint about a chemical-filled concrete field. Now people see the factory and the waterfalls and they know Stottville for this as they drive down route 20,” the resident claimed.

Related History:

Looking for Work - An Interview with Peter H. Stott