As many as 100 employees of an Owens Corning roofing shingle factory joined with their families and company suppliers to pack a north Denver recreation center gymnasium Thursday night and express concern that RTD’s plan to locate a commuter-rail maintenance facility on their plant site threatens their jobs and future.
The Regional Transportation District wants to build a $200 million maintenance center for about 100 commuter rail cars that will be acquired for the FasTracks rail expansion. The agency said its “preferred” location for the maintenance facility, which will employ about 300 people, is Owens Corning’s 14-acre site at 5201 Fox St. near the Mousetrap.
RTD officials say they are obligated by federal law to pay Owens Corning “fair market value” for the site and help relocate the manufacturing operation.
Owens Corning executives say that if the company is not “made whole” by RTD in an acquisition, it may have to shutter the plant.
“It will cost close to $80 million to move” the manufacturing operation and take three years, Owens Corning Vice President Mike Burton told RTD officials at a public meeting Thursday night. “In order to stay in the community, we require fair and equitable compensation.”
Only as a “last resort” will Owens Corning consider shutting down the roofing operation, said Burton, who traveled to Denver from the company’s Toledo, Ohio, headquarters to attend the meeting.
Workers from the factory, and their family members, spoke of fears that the plant will be closed and not relocated if RTD acquires the property.
“This is the wrong location; this is the wrong time,” said R.J. Fernandez, 38, a 17-year employee of Owens Corning, about the proposed rail maintenance center. “We need to look at finding a different location.”
“If you put it somewhere else, we could actually gain 300 jobs,” said Jackie Brinton, wife of a 27-year Owens Corning employee, in pleading with RTD to build the maintenance center in a location where factory jobs would not be lost. “We need manufacturing jobs so we have diversification of our economy.”
“Please reconsider another site and not put at risk these two world-class facilities,” added Daniel Frayre, who has worked at Owens Corning for 26 years. He now heads a nearby Owens Corning asphalt plant which supplies that material to the roof shingle production line.
Bill Shockley, plant leader of the combined roofing products and asphalt operation, said Owens Corning spends $60 million a year buying raw materials and other supplies and services from as many as 200 businesses in the area. The financial health of those companies is threatened by RTD’s plan as well, Shockley said.
Globeville resident Elia Fisher was one of the few speakers at Thursday’s meeting who supported construction of the rail maintenance center on the Owens Corning site.
“I feel looking at another location would further delay the buildout of FasTracks,” Fisher said.
RTD will not be able to do its own detailed analysis of the cost of relocating Owens Corning until this fall, after an environmental study of the Gold Line train and the rail maintenance center is completed, said Liz Telford, RTD’s manager on the Gold Line project.
“We want to work with RTD,” said Owens Corning’s Burton. “We want them to understand our business.”
