Another shot to the head
Massena, in recent years, has taken on the look of an aging boxer showing signs of too many blows to the face, a sort of punch-drunk demeanor that comes from having far too many disappointments and far too few successes. With the growing realization that the GM plant is almost certainly going to have to come down, the town has taken one more shot to the face that sends it once again staggering toward the ropes.
To be sure, there was no guarantee that the GM property would have found a willing tenant who could have restored some of the jobs lost in the past decade at GM and Alcoa. The hulking 800,000-square-foot plant is 50 years old, which is not perhaps old for a home, but is well up there in years for a manufacturing facility. It has subsurface pollution from a variety of sources, any number of which can kill you. And the best way to send goods manufactured there south into the U.S. is to go north into Canada, because the nearest limited access highway is Canadian 401. All of these things militate against finding a company to restore the 1,200 or so jobs GM was providing a decade or so ago.
When the building is demolished – I don't think if even applies any more – the real problems for the property really begin. With petroleum and PCBs permeating the soil beneath the plant, a cleanup will take years to accomplish. Alcoa, for instance, is 20 years on in its environmental cleanup. The process, for a site this large, takes years just to develop an acceptable remediation plan, years of testing and studies and modeling and applications to state and federal agencies that will oversee the process.
Take some examples from St. Lawrence County. The Jones & Loughlin site has been idle for decades, and a combination of no money and no remaining responsible parties has kept any measurable progress at all from being made there. Or look to Ogdensburg, where several riverside sites, such as Diamond International, have lain fallow for years because of the difficulty of putting will and money together in one place to get environmental cleanup done. Judging by these markers, even if the GM plant is blown up this week, it will be decades before the site is clean enough to develop.
Unlike the Jones & Laughlin site, where owners have long since ceased to exist, the GM property has a putative responsible party. But because of the federal bailout of the carmaker, the responsible party is really just a shell company, supported by U.S. taxpayers. GM, with the blessings of the federal government, left just enough money in Motors Liquidation Co. to be able to present the impression it could clean up its messes. It cannot. The cleanup of the Massena site (and while this is my prediction not yet backed up with hard facts) could be more costly than the assets provided to the liquidation company to clean up ALL of the abandoned GM sites. GM has closed 21 U.S. factories in the past 10 years.
Meanwhile, Massena and St. Lawrence County take the double hits of hundreds of lost jobs and a precipitous decline in tax revenue. While the plant is now assessed at $12 million, it's highly unlikely the company would not have been successful in its ongoing attempt to get the property's assessment down to $3.75 million. If the plant is responsible for 75 percent of the total assessment, that means that what is really at risk in the near future are the taxes on $2.8 million, not $9 million. Still, the blow to the town, school district and county will be severe, at any assessment level.
Massena is discovering that low-cost power, while a powerful incentive to business, is not the be-all and end-all lure to industry. In a nation where manufacturing continues to be a smaller and smaller component of the economy, sites like GM continue to fade in appeal. Add to that the problem of location, and you begin to see the size of the hill local industrial development artisans have to climb.
Massena will go on. Alcoa has recently signed a commitment to stay put and to upgrade its facility there, and in fact, the example GM is presenting might make the aluminum maker even more resolved to keep its operations going, given the cost of shutting them down and paying for the cleanup of the mess that is left behind. Curran Renewable Energy may be pointing the way to future business ventures, relying as it does on green energy and locally produced raw materials to manufacture its end product. And maybe, if the world economy continues to improve (and the U.S. dollar remains weak against Canada's currency), some Canadian firms will decide a plant just across the river makes business sense.
But for now, things aren't improving much if they can be said to be improving at all. The demolition of the GM plant will, in the end, be largely a symbol of Massena's hardscrabble life, but it won't have the effect that it might have, given the plant's condition and the assessment appeal GM was already undertaking. Still, when old-time Massena residents drive by the old plant, the gaping maw that is left when the plant is torn down is going to tear a hole in their hearts. And that kind of symbolism is bad for the soul.
