Kaiser’s Mead smelting plant undergoes demolition

Thousands of people drew paychecks from the sprawling Kaiser Aluminum smelter in north Spokane during its more than 50 years of operation.

The California company that bought the Mead site last year is about a third of the way through a project to put people to work on the property again, this time as a new business and industrial park.

Rather than renovating the several dozen dusty and dirt-caked buildings on the 170-acre property, owner New Mill Capital LLC is tearing down nearly everything and starting from scratch.

New Mill Capital is a division of Industrial Realty Group, a California company that specializes in buying and converting distressed sites.

In 2000, for example, IRG bought the vacant, 3,000-acre McClellan Air Force Base near Sacramento. After cleanup and renovation, the former military base provides space for 240 small companies employing 14,000 people.

IRG Vice President Tom Messmer thinks the Kaiser site in Mead can produce similar, though smaller, results. But it won’t happen quickly, he cautioned.

When the demolition is finished in late 2014, a small fraction of the former Kaiser buildings – about 150,000 square feet in five structures – will be left standing. When New Mill started demolition, there was about 1.5 million square feet of space in buildings on the Mead site.

After demolition is complete, IRG will take over redevelopment of the site. Messmer said a realistic goal is that new companies will be moving in within five years. In 10 years he expects nearly all of the Mead property to be under lease or being developed.

Kaiser’s Mead smelter is a gritty relic of the nation’s rapid buildup of production capacity during World War II. Those plants, like several others on the West Coast, contributed to a massive U.S. effort to build bombers and other airplanes with high-quality aluminum.

IRG researched the site and concluded the smelter had a future if the hazardous materials could be removed and the land prepared for future growth; the company bought it in 2012 for $1.5 million.

Ken Hoff, 61, worked at the Kaiser Mead smelter plant from 1977 until it closed in 2000. He was a pot line laborer, electrician and supervisor in the buildings that made carbon rods for the production of aluminum ingots. After New Mill Capital/IRG took over the property, Hoff became site manager, overseeing the planned demolition and removal of hazardous waste.

The Mead smelter project is a brownfield site, in the jargon of urban planning. That means it had an industrial use and may have some history of contamination.

A 425-acre parcel of undeveloped land north of the smelter, still owned by Kaiser Aluminum, is considered a greenfield site – open property. Kaiser spokesman Bob Burke said the company will likely look for a developer to take over the property and convert it into a mix of retail and commercial parcels.