The site of the former Ford Wixom Assembly plant is again up for sale, this time with smaller acreage, no more factory, new neighbors and a bigger price tag.
The Boston-based development firm that bought 240 acres of the industrial site at I-96 and Wixom Road — including the massive and idled auto plant — for about $7 million in early 2013 from Ford’s real estate arm has since sold several parcels and rebranded the area “Assembly Park.”
It is now marketing the remaining 182 undeveloped acres for resale.
There are two advertised prices: $10.5 million for 140 acres of partially cleared land and $0 for title to the other 40-some acres, which are covered with concrete slabs and contain a football field-sized pit in the ground.
Local officials say there has been substantial interest in the available land, although no signed deals yet.
Whoever buys the acreage would become neighbors with the newly built headquarters and retail store of General RV, as well as a nearly completed Menards store scheduled to open this fall. Both buildings are on parcels carved out of the former plant site.
A third parcel (23 acres) was bought last fall by Wixom-based Schonsheck Inc., which says it is working with an unnamed developer to construct multiple buildings there for light industrial use.
“We’ll build as soon as someone comes along and wants to build,” Schonsheck President Craig Zokas said.
Gone is the 4.7-million-square-foot Ford plant, which last produced Lincoln Town Cars before closing in 2007. The Boston firm, Barrow Development, demolished the gigantic structure two years ago and sold the scrap metal.
The firm’s president, Brian Wilson, then tried unsuccessfully to convince Ford’s real estate arm — Ford Land — to buy back the site. He also accused Ford Land of reneging on contractual obligations to clean up pollution on the site, claiming Ford was behind schedule and couldn’t make a mid-2016 deadline.
“Just as I have absolutely no idea how to manufacture a Ford Mustang, they have absolutely no idea how to clean up the site,” Wilson said last year.
Ford Land disputed the allegations, saying it was actually ahead of schedule.
Today, Ford Land has essentially completed its job of trucking out 200,000 tons of contaminated soil to landfills, officials with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality told the Free Press this week.
Yet here are still some unsettled environmental issues. Tracy Kecskemeti, a DEQ district supervisor, said Wilson’s company is responsible for improperly disposing of some demolition materials that should have been trucked out of the site, but were instead buried in pits there.
“We asked him to clean it up,” Kecskemeti said. “Mr. Wilson maintains that he’s not in violation of the law; that he didn’t dispose of anything improperly.”
Neither Wilson nor his attorney returned multiple messages for the article.
Wixom Mayor Kevin Hinkley said the city has been fielding interest in the available 182 acres.
“We get inquires on a daily basis for a variety of different venues, from water parks to industrial-type commercial buildings,” Hinkley said. “We had a plastics company come and look at the property back in the fall. They made a decision to go elsewhere, which was kind of disappointing.”
From the city’s standpoint, the next step for the developer is to further groom the land for resale by removing all of the concrete and repurposing it into an access road. The mayor said he believes Wilson is presently considering contractors for that job.
“All the concrete there that is left on site today, of the 182 acres, has to be broken up, crushed and used there on site for road base,” Hinkley said. “I would estimate that that project, from start to finish, would be anywhere from 12 to 14 months.”
A Menards spokesman said the new Wixom store, scheduled to open this fall, will feature a full-service lumberyard, garden center and a line of groceries.
The Ford plant opened in 1957 and employed nearly 5,500 workers at its 1970s peak, but only 1,100 when it closed in 2007.
