Jonesville seeks to redevelop former manufacturing plant downtown

Home City News Jonesville seeks to redevelop former manufacturing plant downtown
Jonesville seeks to redevelop former manufacturing plant downtown

The city of Jonesville seeks to redevelop the former Klein Tools manufacturing plant and bring a new business into the downtown riverfront property. 

“It’s a challenge, of course, to reuse a factory,” said City Manager Jeff Gray, “but there’s a great opportunity there with all of the space.” 

The city is especially interested in “retail, office, food service, residential, or other uses similar to existing businesses downtown,” according to the request for proposals.

The request for proposals says that the city will consider any proposal that increases the tax base and creates jobs. Redevelopment proposals will be accepted through the end of the year or until a pre-development agreement is reached. 

At a public meeting in 2018, citizens ranked potential priorities for the city. According to the city’s master plan, “Redevelopment of Klein Tool/Vaco Building” sat at the top of the list. 

The building is located at the intersection of Water Street and US-12/Chicago Street, and it was used first by Vaco and then by Klein Tools as a manufacturing plant, according to the request for proposals.

“The master plan is kind of the go-to place to see, this is what the citizens want the town to be, and this is kind of our road map or where we should have our focus,” Don Toffolo, the chair of the Downtown Development Authority and the Proposal Review Committee said.

“We took that as the DDA and said, ‘This is what the community wants, to see this redeveloped; what’s our best avenue to make that happen?’” Toffolo said, “I guess that’s the main catalyst for where we are today with this request for proposals.”

The committee is not looking for fully designed projects at this stage, but basic design concepts and information about prospective developers, according to the request for proposals. 

“What we’re trying to do at this stage is find someone who we could enter into an exclusive agreement with to let them do their due diligence on the property—to do environmental studies, to do structural studies, to develop a detailed concept,” Gray said.

Gray said the building offers a great opportunity to developers. 

“There’s a little more than 68,000 square feet of building,” Gray said. “If you look at the building on an aerial photograph, there’s about as much square footage there as there is in the first floor of all the rest of the downtown.” 

Gray said the property has some environmental issues because of the way materials were disposed of back in the 1940s.

“It’s been pretty thoroughly studied over the years,” he said, “and we’ve posted all of the environmental information that we have.” 

He said developers would want to conduct further studies for themselves.  

Toffolo said that the city received a grant for a study “to determine the extent of the contamination.”

“What we learned from that grant and from the study that was done,” he said, “was that the contaminants are not moving, which is a good thing.” 

He said the study also showed that contamination was worse on the older north part of the building than on the south side by U.S.-12.

“U.S. 12/Chicago St. has 12,000 cars a day on it, so it’s one of, if not the busiest, streets in the county, and the downtown for the most part is able to fill vacancies as they become available,” he said, “so I think the DDA just thinks we’ve got a really great opportunity.”

An open house was held at the property on Oct. 6 to allow community members and prospective redevelopers to see the building, Gray said. Review of proposals began on Oct. 25.

The city has received one proposal and is seeking further information from the prospective developers, Gray said.

Vaco Products built the first factory on the property in 1945. Klein Tools acquired the property in 1986, and first used the space for manufacturing, then leased it for storage. The village of Jonesville, now the city of Jonesville, initially continued leasing the space to Martinrea, a local manufacturer, after it purchased the property in 2010, Gray said. 

When Martinrea no longer needed the additional warehouse space, Toffolo said, the DDA decided it was time to consider redevelopment. 

When the opportunity did not result in serious interest, the DDA decided this fall to solicit proposals. They developed the request for proposals and organized the Proposal Review Committee with members from the DDA, City Council, and Planning Commission, Gray said. 

This committee will conduct an initial review of proposals, Toffolo said. If the committee recommends a proposal, it will be submitted to the City Council, which has the final vote on whether or not to approve the sale. 

“Hopefully something comes from this,” Toffolo said, “and somebody is willing to take it on and turn it into something that would benefit the entire city and community.”