The city is looking to buy a heavily polluted property with a decrepit three-story warehouse at the former Vacuum Oil site on the banks of the Genesee River in southwest Rochester.
Mayor Malik Evans has submitted legislation to City Council that would allocate as much as $70,000 to acquire 5 Flint St. in the Plymouth-Exchange neighborhood.
The measure calls for the city to try negotiating a sale with the owner, but authorizes taking it through condemnation if the two sides can’t reach an agreement. The owner, DHD Ventures, has been ordered by a judge to sell the property as part of a foreclosure case.
The parcel is integral to city efforts to restore the Genesee River Wall and revitalize the Plymouth-Exchange neighborhood, a working-class neighborhood in transition.
“This is a pretty significant effort,” said Erik Frisch, deputy commissioner of the Department of Neighborhood and Business Development. “It’s one of the larger projects from the ROC the Riverway initiative and it’s an important neighborhood project, as well, to better connect the communities — the PLEX neighborhood and adjacent communities — to the river. It’s one of the most beautiful portions of our river right there.”
DHD purchased the property, located where Flint Street dead-ends at the Genesee River, in 2008.
The firm, led by Tom Masaschi, planned to clean up and redevelop the parcel, but the project languished. Last March, a state judge ordered DHD to sell the properties as part of a mortgage foreclosure case brought by U.S. Income Partners, a Henrietta-based lending institution that specializes in financing real estate developments.
That matter was one of several foreclosure cases filed by U.S. Income Partners against DHD. The lender alleged DHD had defaulted on $1.6 million in loans on the Vacuum Oil parcels alone.
The former Vacuum Oil properties are heavily contaminated from operations of the refinery, which shut down in 1935. The heart of the 40-acre complex was along Flint Street, and a series of explosions, spills, and other incidents within the complex saturated the soil with petroleum and other chemicals.
The city owns around 18 acres surrounding 5 Flint St. that it wants to see developed. The legislation before the, City Council states that the remediation and development of those properties cannot be completed “unless the 5 Flint Street property is incorporated into the city’s remedy.”
The city previously went through an in-depth planning process for the Vacuum Oil site and the neighborhood around it. That resulted in a vision for publicly accessible development of the waterfront and potential private development inland.
"By doing the remediation and cleanup, it will make any of those redevelopment options possible,” said Anne Spaulding, manager of the city’s Division of Environmental Quality. “Without that nothing can really happen at that site.”
