I was standing this week beside a cauldron of scalding asphalt on a mechanized line that turns out enough roofing shingles each hour to cover 20 homes, when it occurred to me that this was the sort of manufacturing facility that politicians complain is dying off in America — shutting down operations altogether or fleeing to the comforts of cheaper labor offshore.
Yet here I was in Adams County, on Fox Street not far from the Mousetrap, watching high-tech machines coat fiberglass matting with asphalt and roofing granules, in a complex process that isn’t finished until stacks of shingles are shrink- wrapped in pink plastic and marked for shipment.
It’s the only shingle plant in Colorado — up-to-date and efficient — with contracts in the neighborhood of $60 million and a payroll of $8.5 million. You’d think we’d want to keep that money in circulation — as well as save the 80 or so jobs at the Owens Corning plant and the 20 positions at the company’s nearby asphalt facility.
Unfortunately, your tax dollars and mine may end up purchasing the site (through condemnation, no doubt) and turning it into a commuter rail maintenance facility for the Regional Transportation District. Unless RTD can be prodded into second thoughts.
Now, RTD does need a maintenance facility for FasTracks, and it can’t just be plopped down anywhere in town. For starters, the maintenance yard has got to have rail access and be adjacent to an RTD transit corridor. And if it is located too close to residential neighborhoods, citizen groups will start to howl.
The agency has already had to back away from a couple of potential sites because of cost concerns at one and neighborhood opposition at the other. So its officials may well be tempted to march ahead this time no matter what, on the theory that whatever site they choose, they’ll end up having to strap on their flak jackets anyway.
Since federal funds are helping to build FasTracks, RTD can’t just condemn a viable business and leave it to fend for itself. If the firm wants to reopen elsewhere, the transit agency must pay reasonable relocation costs, as it has promised in this case to do.
But Owens Corning officials insist it’s not so simple. In a letter to RTD board members, Vice President Mike Burton of the Toledo-based company said “relocation of such a plant would require between two and three years to plan and execute. It would be an extraordinarily difficult and expensive undertaking.”
How expensive? Oh, $80 million or so, according to the company’s preliminary estimate — of your money, remember.
As plant manager Bill Shockley guides me on the tour, he repeatedly points out equipment or piping that was custom-engineered to fit the facility. Some of the plant’s equipment can be packed up and moved, he acknowledges, but lots of it will have to be replaced.
When I discussed the site with two members of RTD’s board, chair Lee Kemp and second vice chair Noel Busck, both acknowledged that relocation costs of that magnitude, if genuine, would be a concern. Each also insisted that the die is not yet cast in favor of the site, although neither had any specific alternative in mind.
Let’s hope RTD officials can find one. Even if Owens Corning chose to build another plant after condemnation by RTD, there is no assurance the company would remain in metro Denver or even Colorado. It just seems self-defeating to chase off such an enterprise in such fragile economic times.
“No offense,” Shockley says, “but not everyone can work in the service industry.”
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
