Fenton — It has been nearly six months since the last Dodge Ram rolled out of the massive Chrysler plant here.
Now, on a weekday morning, there are perhaps two dozen cars in parking lots meant for thousands. The neat rows of shiny new pickups are gone. The smokestacks stand cold.
And six months after the closure of vast twin auto plants along Interstate 44, there is a growing conversation about just what to do them, how to take this empty symbol of St. Louis’ old economy and use it to help the new one.
It’s a tough question.
There are, after all, few uses for a one-story building the size of 86 football fields, surrounded by acres and acres of asphalt. Throw in environmental question marks and a weak economy, and the options grow even fewer.
But local leaders want to take a hard look at what those options might be.
St. Louis County is applying for a federal grant of nearly $1.6 million to establish a commission to study the site. With cash from the state, the county and the city of Fenton, officials are ready to launch a two-year, $2 million effort to plan incentives, cleanup, marketing and more.
"There’s a lot of things that could happen here," said County Executive Charlie Dooley. "How do we use this land to attract the business we want?"
That question is being asked by many cities these days. At least 20 U.S. auto plants have closed in the last two years, from Delaware to Detroit to St. Louis, and most of them face the same daunting challenges of age, size and a highly specialized use that is no longer needed.
"We’re kind of new in this game right now," said Kim Hill, who heads the Automotive Communities Program at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. "Obviously, there are a lot of facilities that shut. There’s a lot of head-scratching going on.
Chrysler alone shuttered eight plants when it filed for bankruptcy in April. It spun them off into a separate company and now must sell them one by one under court supervision. A spokesman for the automaker wouldn’t discuss any specifics about the two Fenton plants but said they were being actively marketed. He acknowledged it would take some "creativity to get them back into productive use."
So far, just one Chrysler plant has found a buyer.
Last month, the University of Delaware closed on a $24.3 million deal for the automaker’s assembly plant in Newark, Del. The 272-acre site is across the street from the university’s campus, and the school hopes to expand there, said spokesman Dave Brond.
"It provides generations of capacity for us to grow," he said. "It adds 22 percent to the size of our campus."
The university hopes to take advantage of an Amtrak line that runs by the plant to build offices and stores around a rail station, and to partner with a medical school and a nearby Army base on research and teaching facilities.
"It was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up," Brond said.
Still, he expected it would be three or four years before any buildings were complete. And Delaware officials knew the closure was coming and started talking with Chrysler 20 months ago, eight months before the plant actually closed. That’s a contrast with St. Louis, where local leaders had focused mainly on getting Chrysler to keep operating in Fenton almost until the day of the shutdown.
That may have been a long shot, but given the thousands of good-paying jobs Chrysler supported here, it was one worth taking, said U.S. Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-St. Louis.
"Unfortunately that didn’t work," he said. "Now we’re at Plan B."
Some, such as Carnahan, say Plan B might be a next-generation automaker’s moving into Fenton, something like Fisker Automotive’s decision to buy a GM plant in Wilmington, Del., to build plug-in hybrid vehicles.
But those opportunities are few, and the longer the plant sits empty, the less appealing it becomes payday loan.
So when it comes to finding a new use, Dooley said, pretty much everything is on the table.
He will have the commission study cleanup costs and potential incentives for a developer, the prospect of breaking the 5-million-square-foot building up for several tenants, or knocking the thing down and starting over.
"We will do everything we possibly can to make something happen there," Dooley said. "That’s too much space to leave undone."
But one thing that won’t happen is the county’s taking over the site itself. It’s just too complicated, Dooley said. A private company will have to lead any project.
That’s what has happened in Hazelwood, where Ford Motor Co. closed a plant in 2006. California-based Panattoni Development Co. bought it two years later and has since demolished the 3.5-million-square-foot structure. It plans to turn the 160-acre site into Aviator Business Park, an 11-building, $200 million complex of office and warehouse space.
Site work is basically complete, said Mark Branstetter, a senior vice president in Panattoni’s Clayton office, and the company will start marketing it to tenants in early 2010. It will have some nice things to offer, he said: a good location on Lindbergh Boulevard near Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and Interstate 270, a rail line, tremendous power and water connections, and a 25-year tax abatement negotiated with the city of Hazelwood.
Even with all that, Branstetter said, it made no sense for Panattoni to keep the old buildings in place. The plan was always to tear them down.
"These buildings really aren’t made for any sort of adaptive reuse," he said. "They’re simply an envelope around a bunch of equipment. And once that equipment goes out, it has no use."
Then there’s what lies beneath the envelope.
Most auto plants made cars for decades. The ground underneath may include metals, dangerous chemicals, all sorts of things. Often, no one is quite sure what is there, or who would be liable for pollutants two or three owners down the road.
If the concrete slab is taken up, cleanup costs could easily run $10 million or $20 million, Hill said. That makes buying one without some sort of insurance or cleanup fund a risky proposition.
"That is probably the No. 1 issue in moving these properties," he said.
In Hazelwood, Branstetter said, Panattoni did extensive testing when it took over the property. It thinks it knows what is in the ground. In Delaware, Brond said, the state took on the risk and factored it into the price.
In Fenton, that is still in the future. It will be part of the task of Dooley’s commission — if it gets funding. The county executive said he hoped to hear on that by the end of the year. Carnahan, who is supporting the application, said it might be January. Either way, they want to get started.
Meanwhile, the bankruptcy court is in the process of hiring a broker to market the site, and several people close to the process say a number of potential buyers are taking a close look.
"There’s been enough interest that (advisers for the bankruptcy court) believe it’s going to be sold, probably sooner rather than later," said Fenton Mayor Dennis Hancock.
If it is, the challenge will become what happens next, and how this place that may well have put out its last-ever vehicle six months ago can find a new reason for being.
"The obstacle is in people believing that something is going to go there," Dooley said. "To a lot of people, a church is a church and a school is a school and a plant is a plant. We’ve got to figure out how to turn it into something else."
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