A Fortune 500 company with a production facility in northeast Denver is fighting RTD’s plans to build a commuter rail maintenance facility on its land.
Owens Corning has been at 5201 Fox St. since 1977 and argues that moving the only roofing manufacturing plant in Colorado would cost taxpayers $80 million to $100 million and its employees their jobs.
Plant manager Bill Shockley said roughly 80 people work at the roofing plant making shingles and another 15 to 20 are employed at the company’s asphalt plant. He said Owens Corning does business with 200 local companies and has a $60 million annual economic impact.
“We continue to invest in this plant. We’ve spent $9 million in the last two years,” Shockley said. “It’s not something you can just pick up and move. There’s miles of piping, conduit, natural-gas piping, hot-asphalt piping, hot-oil tanks. Just equipment you don’t pick up and relocate.”
The Regional Transportation District has identified the property and two others adjacent to it as an “ideal” site for its maintenance facility after evaluating 23 other sites in the metro area. Two other possibilities were scuttled because of cost and failed negotiations.
RTD Assistant General Manager Scott Reed said the site is still being evaluated but is appealing because it is adjacent to a rail line, contains a significant amount of land and is in an industrial neighborhood.
The proposed maintenance facility would create 300 permanent jobs. It became necessary after voters in 2004 passed the FasTracks plan to expand the metro area’s transit system to serve roughly 80,000 riders per day.
“Any time you have a public works project that includes things like building new rail lines, new facilities and things that are required to support those transit lines, you have to acquire property,” Reed said. “The last thing we like to do is go through the property acquisition process knowing there are businesses and homes that have to be relocated, and unfortunately that is part of the whole process.”
RTD’s board members have agreed to visit the roofing plant in the near future. By law, RTD is required to pay “fair market value” for any property it acquires and to provide “relocation assistance.” An appraiser would be hired to determine how much it would cost to move the plant.
RTD hopes to begin construction on its new facility next fall. Shockley said even if he had other property picked out and a building permit in hand, it would take two years to build a new manufacturing plant.
“I think there’s a win-win out there,” Shockley said. “I think we could find something to satisfy both of us and allow us to continue to do what we do best and that’s making shingles.”
