Otsego city commissioners are hoping to finish a story that began in the 1980s by selling a piece of city-owned property on Helen Avenue.
City commissioners voted Tuesday, July 5, to authorize city manager Thad Beard to try to negotiate a final sale.
Beard said, “It doesn’t mean we’ve sold it, but it authorizes me to begin the negotiations and begin 60 days to go through the process.
“I don’t have a sale agreement; I do have a general purchase agreement with him.”
The city manager said he’d been talking to area businessman Kenneth Bleeker about the property and a tentative agreement had been signed.
“He wants to purchase the southern 3.1-acre lot and look into what is required to culvert the county drain,” Beard said.
The plan for the property is to build a storage facility, but not the kind of mini storage units that comes to mind immediately when hearing that term.
“He wants to do storage units that could house RVs, motorhomes, buses; things like that,” Beard said.
City officials said that sounded like a good use for the property and they’d be happy to have Bleeker doing business there.
Commissioner Kathy Misner said, “This potential buyer isn’t someone we’d ever have to worry about.”
Mayor Tom Gilmer agreed, “He’s a good businessman and it’s a good use of the property.”
Commissioners also pointed to a plaque on the wall of their meeting room, which showed Bleeker’s eight years as mayor of Otsego from 1979 to 1987.
Beard said the negotiations over price would be ongoing, with the city hoping to recoup the amount it invested into the property over the years to break even.
Those costs came from the efforts in the 1980s to build a large coal-fired power plant on the property.
“Co-Gen was going to build there,” Misner said. “They pulled out for I don’t remember what reason.”
Beard said, “There was an agreement to build a state-of-the-art co-generation facility. Then, it all fell through.
“The city had about $42,000 invested.”
The plan was for a power generation facility that used steam from the adjoining paper mill (Mead then, Rock Tenn when it closed) and coal to produce power, which the operators would sell to Consumers Energy.
A coating mill, though, had previously occupied the site and the ground was contaminated. To encourage the arrival of the co-gen, which promised 40 jobs in Otsego, the city acquired the property and cleaned it up, leaving it ready to be redeveloped.
But when the plan fell through, they ended up holding the pieces and have until this day.
The city commission will need to change the zoning for Bleeker to go ahead with his plan.
Beard said the storage business was a permitted use in the city’s Commercial districts, but not its Industrial as the Helen Avenue area (sandwiched between the old Rock Tenn mill and the current USG operation) is zoned.
“It should have been included,” Beard said.
So, he recommends the city just change the overall zoning ordinance to allow such facilities in both zones. Beard said if all goes according to plan, the commission could vote on the change in August.
Contact Dan Pepper at dpepper@allegannews.com or at (269) 673-5534 or (269) 685-9571.
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