Dayton, Ohio

By the time the next summer Olympics come around in 2012, the General Motors Corp. Moraine assembly plant will likely still be dormant. GM has told local officials the plant will likely be dormant for three to five years, said Montgomery County Commissioner Judy Dodge.

As such, local officials also have abandoned efforts to coax GM to retrofit the 3.8 million-square-foot plant for another model, according to reports at the Regional Response Task Force-GM Moraine this month.

Dodge said the priority from this point forward is finding a re-use and redevelopment for the complex, one of the largest empty industrial sites in the Dayton area.

The task force will also continue to focus on retraining the thousands of former plant workers. It plans to hire a consultant company in March, thanks to a $187,500 federal grant awarded in September, to examine redevelopment options for the site, Dodge said.

Dan Flores, a GM spokesperson, said it is impossible to give a time line regarding the plant’s future, which shut down in December after more than 50 years of operation.

“I can’t speculate on how long that will take, but it is a very extensive process,” he said.

With the company in a financial tailspin, Flores said GM will work quickly to divest the property because of the costs to maintain the site, even if it is dormant.

Flores would not specify how much it costs to maintain the plant, but called it “significant.”

What GM will do with the property, which includes about 350 acres of company-owned land, depends on several factors, he said. The most important of those is how much market demand there is in the geographic area.

Unfortunately, the Dayton region has a glut of vacant space, driving down demand.

There is about 3 million square feet of vacant space abandoned by Delphi Corp. in the area alone, said Digger Daley, a commercial broker with Dayton-based Colliers Turley Martin Tucker.

Nevertheless, he said the plant has attractive features, especially its location off Interstate 75. He said the railroad access to the plant is also attractive for distribution.

But the plant must also contend with other prominent distribution sites, such as the vacant 770,000-square-foot Cooper Tire building, visible off I-75

There are no prospective buyers lined up to buy the GM plant, because GM has not begun marketing the property. It is still in the process of decommissioning the site, Flores said.

The company has to figure out what to do with millions of dollars worth of machines — whether they will be sold, stored or scrapped for parts.

Before any perspective buyer or tenant would move in, GM would have to complete an Environmental Protection Agency inspection of the property and complete any cleanup, which could take as long as a year.

Flores said the Moraine plant is large by automotive standards, the average being between 2.5 million and 3 million square feet.

He could not estimate what an environmental inspection on a plant with the size and legacy of the Moraine plant would reveal.

Should the company decide to demolish the building, Flores said it would also take a long time.

He would not give an approximate time frame for when a decision would be made about that, only that any demolition activities would stretch over several fiscal quarters.

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