Farmland plant demolition expected to pick up

Published 12:00 am Friday, June 6, 2003

The demolition of the old Farmland Foods site is expected to be complete by the end of July, according to city officials.

After months of work and a recent standstill, remaining buildings on the site are expected to be down by late June.

Originally the completion date had been set for mid-May, but differences in opinion on the cost of asbestos removal and shoring caused a delay, which pushed the date back.

Email newsletter signup

Paul Sparks, city manager, said the building demolition will be slowed a bit by asbestos removal in the next few weeks, but then the project should move fairly quickly from then on.

Veit Construction, the company in charge of the project, will be filling in the grounds, grinding up the concrete into fill, and cleaning up the site after that.

The city will take the title to the land upon completion.

When the city takes over the property, the next stage will be subterrainian environmental cleanup. The cleanup is expected to be paid for with funding from federal and state grants, which Sparks said the city was encouraged to apply for by the state, as well as money received from lawsuits by the city against insurers of that property before 1982, which under their coverage are responsible for environmental damage.

So far, though, finding those insurers hasn’t been easy.

According to Sparks, the city and the law firm it hired haven’t found the insurers for Wilson Co. during that period.

&uot;We haven’t been able to track them down yet,&uot; he said.