Harding Site 'like brand new'

08/26/2004

Steve Charest (left, foreground) leads Mayor Mike Hancock and other city officials on a tour fo the former Harding Carpets building on Friday morning.
BY MICHAEL-ALLAN MARION
EXPOSITOR STAFF / BRANTFORD

As he stood in front of about 50 city politicians and staff at an entrance to the Harding Carpets building Friday, Steve Charest, president of King and Benton Development Corp., made the crowd a promise he delivered on in spades. "The last time you were here you saw a shocking sight," he told them. "You're going to be pleasantly shocked this time." Charest was referring to a tour he took many of the same people on two months ago through what was a neglected former carpet manufacturing building disposing a fire hazard, thousands of scrap tires, the detritus of a chop shop busted by the police and a repository of illegal activities. What the crowd saw on Friday’s second tour was nothing like that.

"It's like a brand-new building," Coun. John Sless said as he stepped through an entranceway and his head arched around at a bare, cavernous room. All the forbidding stacks and piles the visitors had gaped at two months ago were gone.

"It's a helluva lot better than it was, I'll tell you," Mayor Mike Hancock said as he walked along.

"This guy's a miracle I worker," said Brant MPP Dave Levac. "When I first saw what this place-was like, I thought Tie's nuts w try to do this.' But look at it now." As the entourage proceeded through one vacant space after another, Charest and Aaron Levine of the firm Environmental Management Group described what had been done with the mess, the building's structural problems and contamination concerns. EMG has almost finished removing 145 truckloads or 4,100 tones of rubble to recycling sites and the landfill, along with 5,000 to 6,000 odd-sized pallets. It has also trucked away 4,500 scrap tires, identified and removed 1,000 drums of chemicals, and extracted 6,000 feet of asbestos.
"Everything's coming out of here," Charest said in one room. "There will only be four walls left." All doors and windows
Have been repaired and made secure. Temporary electrical transformers and interior lighting have been installed.

All that effort is just the first phase in the company's
$3.25-million plan to redevelop the block-long building on a 10-acre patch of land into the state-of-the-art warehouse.

The plan is to demolish a one-third area in the centre of the building complex to create a courtyard where transports can gain access to bay doors leading reconstructed compartments. In the second phase of its remediation, King and Benton; and EMG have done 72 of what will be 130 borings around the block-long building and the 10-acre site to conduct and environmental analysis of the property.

They will also install monitoring devices that will allow for continuous groundwater readings and analysis. Mennonite crews recruited by King and Benton have completed about 30 per cent of the demolition. Workers were seen scurrying about the site Friday. Charest said work is ahead of schedule and on target for completion and a ribbon-cutting ceremony in late spring.
So far, about $1.5 million has been spent. About 75 per cent of space in the new enterprise has already been leased and some tenants are starting to move in. For instance, Sonoco is using one spot to store packed bales of cardboard to be recycled.

What visitors saw Friday amounts to a complete structural and community relations turnaround from the controversial Brownfield property that the former council sold for $100,000 back in October in a politically-botched deal with no public consultation and no environmental surety for surrounding Homedale residents.

Since then, King and Benton has had to spend more money than originally planned to give its enterprise public legitimacy and recover from the former council's mistakes.

The company has accomplished much of that by revamping Its plan to gain neighborhood acceptance conducting environmental testing and installing a monitoring system to ease public angst, and establishing a community advisory committee that meets regularly to hear up- dates.
"We intend to ensure we are a good neighbor to Homedale area and a responsible corporate citizen here in Brantford," said Charest.


He has already told the advisory committee it can set up process to have the neighborhood pick a name for the new enterprise.

Also present Friday was Six-Nations Coun. Sid Henhawk who is chairman of economic development. Six Nations has recently signed an agreement with King and Benton to redevelop and market the defunct Grand River Mills building in the Oneida business park.

"I think this is moving along quite well," said Henhawk “Working with Steve has been a good experience. As we can see here, he knows what he needs to do and does it.”

Plans are proceeding in much the same way at Grand River Mills,

He said. “Like this place we’re moving ahead.”