Sinclair demo cost now expected to reach $15.3 million

Demolishing the former Sinclair meatpacking plant now is expected to cost $15.3 million, a sum that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is slated to pay in its entirety.

This week, the City Council is amending the demolition contract between the city and local demolition contractor D.W. Zinser Co. of Walford, increasing the existing contract of $7.366 million to the $15.3-million figure. The initial part of contract was for the initial phase of the demolition.

FEMA agreed to pay for the demolition after it concluded that the city-owned plant, parts of which the city had been leasing out to small businesses at the time of the June 2008 flood, posed an “imminent threat” to public health and safety because of flood damage and two post-flood fires.

In recent days, Greg Eyerly, the city's flood-recovery director, noted that moldy corn that had been stored at the former packinghouse was going to add a bit to the demolition expense, an addition on Monday that he estimated would be $150,000. The extra cost comes because the wet corn, which will leach once in a landfill, must be taken to a lined landfill in Illinois. The corn also is mixed with other demolition debris, and so the entire mix must go to Illinois. Eyerly has said it could be 800 to 900 truckloads. The city is asking FEMA to pay the cost.

Most of Sinclair demolition material is being buried at the unlined Mount Trashmore landfill, just across the river from the former Sinclair plant. Mount Trashmore, which had been closed, was reopened to handle flood debris.

Eyerly now says the Sinclair demolition is about half complete.

By way of perspective:

But for the flood and the current FEMA-paid demolition, it's hard telling how many years it would have taken City Hall to find money from the federal government or elsewhere to pay to demolish the former Sinclair meatpacking plant, which was something of a eyesore just south of downtown.

Before the June 2008 flood, the City Council had put the Sinclair matter on the side burner. At the time, the council was focused on other things, such as riverfront development and downtown revitalization, not the Sinclair plant.

The council, which purchased the former plant and its 30-acre site in early 2007 with $2 million in city funds and a $2 million grant from the Hall-Perrine Foundation, had been satisfied to keep a sprinkling of small-business tenants in a portion of the former plant, at least in the near term.