As General Motors starts to sell off some best assets under its restructuring plan to a streamlined new entity, its worst assets, including a highly toxic foundry and a nine-hole golf course, are also going to auction.
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The foundry in Massena, New York, bordered on the east by the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation and on the north by the St Lawrence River, was built to make aluminum cylinder heads for the Chevrolet Corvair in the 1950s. It generated PCB sludge and waste from hydraulic fluids which oozed into the water and the land and was picked up by animals and moved up the food chain through fish and into Mohawk women – into their breast milk, into their babies.
Lawyers for the Indian tribe say the Massena site is now on the New York State Registry of Hazardous Waste Sites and on the federal superfund list of contaminated places. While eligible for federal clean-up money, some of the US$225m cost may have to come from creditors.
The Hyatt Hills Golf Complex in Clark, New Jersey, was built on the reclaimed site of a factory which made hard rubber steering wheels and door handles for GM in 1938 and is described as the “best conditioned nine-hole course in New Jersey.”
GM PR chief Tom Wilkinson said: “The new GM hardly needs to be in the golf course business. The old GM will be selling a lot of potentially valuable but peripheral property the company accumulated over 100 years, kind of like a big garage sale. You will see some really good real estate deals come out of this for investors and communities.”
New York state in a court filing earlier listed 11 GM sites that have contamination or “ongoing environmental compliance obligations” such as cleaning up soil, sediment, surface and groundwater and long-term monitoring, including property in Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo.
Bloomberg News noted that GM also planned to give up 16 plants and associated real estate in Delaware, Ohio, New York, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Michigan, as well as an industrial park in Anderson, Indiana, a former Cadillac site in Detroit, the parking lots in Flint, offices and an employee development center in Pontiac, Michigan, and 76 acres of vacant land in Van Buren, Michigan.
