The push to overcome big obstacles and seize big opportunities at old Ecusta Mill site
The completion of a stretch of a long-delayed roadway could boost economic-development prospects for the site -- if a buyer can overcome the legacy of decades of pollution.
Dan DeWitt
PISGAH FOREST — The orange barrels and “Road Closed” signs could be packed up as soon as next week.
After five years of construction and delays, cars and trucks will flow on the stretch of the four-lane Davidson River Village Connector between Ecusta Road and Hendersonville Highway, adding transportation access to the list of assets that makes the 525-acre site of the former Ecusta Mill paper plant perhaps the greatest economic-development opportunity in Transylvania County.
Though the land is flat and grassy, much of it lies above the floodplain. It boasts access to the city of Brevard’s utilities and has been approved for a mixed-use development plan that includes space for retail and lodging, as well as up to 1,000 residential units that could help address the county’s acute housing shortage.
Or a buyer could follow plans created with the help of Duke Energy, developing this land at the confluence of the Davidson and French Broad rivers for industry and addressing another of Transylvania’s most pressing needs — manufacturing jobs in a labor market too dependent on low-wage tourism and service employment.
“It’s probably the best industrial site in Western North Carolina,” said Mark Tooley, the former board chair of the Transylvania Economic Alliance.
And Foundry Commercial, the real estate firm hired by owner Davidson River Village LLC to sell the land, says on its website that the property “represents a trophy development opportunity.”
Yet 19 years have passed since the closure of the mill, 13 years since the property was purchased by Davidson River, 12 years since the company received initial city approval for the mixed-use development, six years since the finalization of the last of the brownfields agreements that set terms for the use of the site, and four years since Foundry put the property on the market for $15 million.
Still, there are no takers.
“I’m sure there’s a lot of people who really wonder what’s going on there,” Tooley said. “They see the old plant site, which is flat and seemingly ready to develop and wonder why nothing is happening.”
The answer, of course, is the legacy left by the mill’s operation, which Tooley describes as “all the other warts that go along with” the property.
These include, despite an exhaustive cleanup of the site, the continued presence of elevated levels of mercury, as well as agreements with state regulators that carry responsibilities for long-term monitoring and for reporting and remediating any future contamination discovered.
“This property somewhat functions as a historic building that requires maintenance and upkeep and a real good owner,” said Alliance executive director Josh Hallingse. “You have to envision how this maintenance will continue into perpetuity and . . . you have to have folks who are capable of dealing with all of that.”
The History: Jobs and Pollution
Though Hallingse would welcome a developer following the existing mixed-use plan, he said, he has pushed for the site to serve as an industrial hub for several reasons, the main one being that he hopes to attract clean, modern manufacturers that could do what Ecusta did for more than six decades — provide well-paid jobs to a county that badly needs them.
Ecusta founder Harry Straus, capitalizing on access to plentiful river water and a flax-processing technology he pioneered, opened the plant in 1939 as the first maker of cigarette paper in the United States, according to a 2016 profile of Straus in the Asheville Citizen-Times.
Though different subsequent owners would go on to produce different products, including cellophane and rayon, the constant was jobs — about 3,000 of them during peak years of operation, County Commissioner Larry Chapman, a former Ecusta executive, wrote in an email.
“Personally, my family thrived on the wages I made at the plant, as did many families,” he wrote.
But the plant also produced toxins, including high levels of mercury in and around an “electrochemical (EC) building” that was used to make bleach, according to a description of the Ecusta property on the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s website.
The EPA and what is now the state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) negotiated agreements with Davidson River — a joint venture between Prudential Real Estate Investors and Renova Partners, a company specializing in the rehabilitation of polluted properties — “to cover needed environmental investigations and cleanup activities,” the EPA site says.
Between 2008 and 2011, Davidson River demolished old buildings, removed more than 8,200 tons of contaminated soil and installed 71 monitoring wells, the EPA site says. Eight gallons of liquid mercury were discovered in a trench system in the EC building, and more than 500 drums of soil contaminated with the metal were removed from the EC site, according to the EPA.
“They invested a whole lot of time and money and expertise into a property that has a lot of challenges and a lot of opportunity to benefit the community,” Hallingse said.
Restrictions and Responsibilities
But the work left the site with a dizzying array of agreements that are both a boon and a burden to future development.
A previous owner, now called Glatfelter Corp., is responsible for maintaining three old landfills on the site, according to a series of agreements reached with DEQ after the mill’s closure. In 2011, Davidson River and the agency signed two “remedial action plans” that set the terms for monitoring. One of these plans covers the EC building, which is mostly off limits for future development, while the other pertains to the so-called Redevelopment Area that includes the 165 acres that Foundry is marketing for future construction.
Finally, brownfields agreements that define land-use restrictions and maintenance requirements are attached to all seven tracts that make up the property.
These agreements are designed to help developers build on old industrial sites, qualifying them for tax incentives, limiting liability and clearing the way for financing, according to the DEQ website.
And though these agreements will be forever attached to the property, monitoring requirements can be lifted if tests show that contamination has dissipated, said Laura Leonard, the DEQ Division of Waste Management public information officer.
This is the case, for example, at two sites in the Redevelopment Area, a former print shop and a maintenance building, tests of which have revealed no recent elevated levels of petroleum products or other pollutants once found there.
On the other hand, both monitoring requirements and contamination remain in place at the old site of the EC building. The state approved this area for a process that allows for the “natural attenuation” of remaining contaminants as long as they are monitored. In a round of testing last year, according to a report submitted to DEQ, groundwater samples from seven of the 19 monitoring wells contained mercury concentrations above the state standard for safe drinking water, including one sample that was tested at 8.8 times that level.
The brownfields agreements on the two-acre EC site, as well as on another tract that contains the landfills maintained by Glatfelter, limit development to “passive uses” including roads, sidewalks and trails.
Agreements on tracts approved for development, on the other hand, allow the construction of residences, stores, hotels and offices, and, with some restrictions, manufacturing.
But the agreements also include standard language stipulating that an owner who discovers evidence of previously undetected sources of pollution, including “stained or odorous soil,” is required to file a report with DEQ and may ultimately be ordered to “cap (a source of contamination), remove it, or implement other remedial measures,” according to brownfields documents.
Hendersonville native Justin Patwin explored the purchase of the property for his company — Chicago-based Farpoint Development — because he knew how much the mill once meant to Transylvania and hoped the land could again be home to such a crucial economic asset.
“I do feel it has great potential to be a game changer for the region,” he wrote in an email.
Though Farpoint has extensive experience developing brownfields properties, he wrote, talks stalled because of remaining uncertainties.
“The Ecusta Mill site is an extremely complex developmental challenge that requires deep expertise with environmentally sensitive sites, which is likely the reason why no one has ever purchased it for development.”
The Elusive Quest for the Right Buyer
Finding a developer with that expertise has been “a labor of love for me in the last few years,” Hallingse said.
That work includes “doing the legwork” to explore different end uses for the property, which would expand options for future owners.
In 2017, the Alliance worked with the Duke Energy Site Readiness Plan program to draw up a proposal that would squeeze as much manufacturing space as possible from the property, including a factory site covering 1 million square feet.
Among other benefits, this would simplify the process of fulfilling state environmental requirements, he said.
“In my naive view, there’s got to be one entity that’s responsible for the whole thing,” he said. “I don’t think DEQ is going to want to hold 1,000 individual homeowners responsible for land-use restrictions and monitoring.”
And there’s one big reason for offering the property as an industrial parcel in a county known for development obstacles such as steep mountainsides and public ownership of large tracts of land: “We don’t have any and we need it,” he said.
But any changes in the land use, including a third proposal the Alliance created that would add an industrial component to some of the current elements of the approved plan, would require more money and effort from a developer, including the need to reach a new or amended agreement with the city.
“If you change that, you’re starting from scratch,” said Jeremy Owen, a Brevard Realtor and former Alliance board chair.
Building a Road on Brownfields
When people like Owen talk about the development of the Ecusta land, the word “opportunities” is usually quickly followed by the word “challenges.”
Shep Cordray, resident engineer with the state Department of Transportation, has been living with such challenges for five years while supervising the construction of the connector road that Davidson River pushed to improve access.
The connector, which the Transylvania County Commission has asked to be renamed “Veterans’ Way,” initially looked like a bargain. Davidson River donated the right-of-way, and the bid for the construction of the project came in at $6.6 million, well below the estimates in an earlier DOT feasibility study. But the cost of that work, which was slated to be completed November of 2017, has since ballooned to $13.1 million, according to DOT documents.
One big reason for the delay and the added expense: the state agreed to comply with a request from the city of Brevard to replace a traffic signal with a still-unfinished, $2.8 million roundabout on Asheville Highway.
But the first major obstacle was encountered in May of 2016, about a month after the work on the road began. Crews unearthed construction debris in a Glatfelter-maintained landfill that was closer to the surface than a DOT geotechnical report had documented.
The costs of excavating and disposing of debris climbed to $1.5 million partly because of requirements in the brownfields agreement, Cordray said.
“There was no landfill in North Carolina that could take that waste and we ended up having to haul it to South Carolina,” he said.
Including the cost of elevating the roadbed, the exposure of the landfill added a total of $2.3 million to the cost of the project, according to Cordray, who said the work also involved consulting with an array of private and public entities.
“It’s kind of confusing with all the parties that have a say on this parcel,” Cordray said.
That includes Glatfelter, which wrote a letter to DOT a month before the start of construction warning of problems if the state built the road over the landfill and saying the road might impede its ability to monitor pollutants there.
DOT was not aware of those issues until after the contract was awarded, said a department communications officer, David Uchiyama, but some of the issues remain unresolved, Eileen Beck, a Glatfelter spokeswoman and executive, wrote in an email:
“Glatfelter continues to have concerns about the construction of a road over the . . . landfill and we have sent written communications outlining those concerns to the appropriate parties.”
The Continuing Promise
The opportunities for the site, on the other hand, were best expressed by the former face of the Davidson River project, John Hanselman of Renova, said Brevard’s Mayor Pro Tem Mac Morrow.
Renova has since pulled out of the project, but the land is still primarily owned by Prudential, and is managed by Connecticut-based Greenlight Development Partners LLC, whose managing partner and former Renova executive, Michael Singer, declined to comment for this story.
Hanselman didn’t respond to repeated requests for interviews, but shortly after Davidson River Village bought the property in 2008, “he was quite the sales guy,” Morrow said.
“He had the benefit of some successful projects behind him and there was great enthusiasm for his plans for Davidson River Village,” Morrow said.
“He had the vision to realize the importance of the place and its proximity to the rivers and the forest and Asheville,” Morrow said. “He said he wanted it to be thought of like the Grove Park Inn or the Biltmore House.”
Morrow was also quick to offer up continued obstacles to developing the property, which would require annexation into the city and connections with its utility system.
“Because (the mill) was isolated from municipal services, you’re starting from scratch for all your infrastructure needs,” he said.
But he applauds the effort to capitalize on the promise of the property, either by following the existing plan or creating an industrial hub.
“What Josh is doing is exactly what needs to be done,” Morrow said of Hallingse, “looking at areas where we can actually grow our economy.”
Brevard mayor, Jimmy Harris told me that the decision to install a round-about on 64 was decided behind closed doors on a Friday afternoon and the city wasn’t informed until the next Monday