(erielack) Nepera...the end is near

[jdent1_@_optonline.net]

Another former Erie customer, located on the main line just north of Newburgh Jct., in Harriman, NY, is closing.

From the Middletown Times-Herald...

July 03, 2005

Harriman without Nepera
Closing of chemical plant would have financial impact
   
By Chris McKenna
Times Herald-Record
cmckenna_@_th-record.com
   
For years, the Nepera chemical factory in Harriman has occupied an uneasy place in this community, enraging residents with occasional bursts of noxious fumes and with toxic underground discoveries while keeping the local coffers fat with property taxes.
More often than not, the negative has overshadowed the positive, and the tall, silvery distillation towers looming behind a stone building on Route 17 have been grudgingly accepted as part of the landscape ? a vaguely unsettling neighbor who was there before everyone else and wasn't going anywhere.
But now, for the first time since the factory opened in 1942, the Village of Harriman and the surrounding community are awakening to a new reality, one without a Nepera factory.
It has become increasingly evident that the plant's days are numbered, despite suggestions to the contrary by management.
Workers have left in droves ? many laid off, others departing on their own. The biggest wave took place on Thursday, when 20 of the plant's shrinking force of union employees lost their jobs, according to a company layoff schedule obtained by the Sunday Record.
Just a few days earlier, a company spokeswoman revealed to a citizens advisory panel that the factory ? which stopped producing its signature chemical, pyridine, almost two months ago ? isn't making anything anymore, just selling off inventory.
Whatever relief some may feel about Nepera packing up shop and carting off its dangerous ammonia tankers, its closing would be as mixed a blessing as its presence has been.
There has already been extensive cleanup work on Nepera's grounds to remove drums of buried toxic waste and clean ground water polluted by years of waste burning and dumping ? activities done by previous owners many years ago, back when environmental oversight was loose and plant operators did that sort of thing.
But closing the plant would launch the cleanup into a whole new phase, an end game being undertaken as the plant operator is pulling up stakes and severing community ties.
Harriman's village attorney sent the state Department of Environmental Conservation a letter a little over a month ago, asking to meet to discuss the possible closing of the plant.
"The Village is most concerned," attorney Ben Ostrer wrote, "that the closing of the chemical plant may be followed by an abandonment of the property with no responsible party available to undertake any further remediation or removal of buildings or structures."
One reassuring fact for local residents is that a trust fund exists to pay for cleaning of underground contamination at the Nepera site.
That fund, which pools contributions from the factory's previous owners, contains several million dollars and must be replenished if it ever runs dry, says Michael Herman, a member of the citizens panel that meets with Nepera.
Herman, a Woodbury resident who has served on the panel for nine years, urged the company last week to release a closing plan to reassure the community that nothing dangerous will remain when Nepera locks up and leaves.
But he says he worries less about the cleanup ? which must follow environmental regulations and will be overseen by the DEC ? than the prospect of a closed factory sitting unguarded beside Route 17. He hopes it will be secured and quickly dismantled.
"You don't want to have a rusting hulk sitting there," Herman says. "Three-hundred-foot distillation towers look an awful lot like an amusement park to a youngster."
He expressed regret that the plant will likely close, pointing out that plant operations and relations with the community have vastly improved in recent years after rough patches triggered by fumes emissions.
One grim prospect the plant's closing poses is the loss of tax revenue, an especially cruel hit for the tiny Village of Harriman.
Several governments get a chunk of tax money from the plant's owners, who have 104 acres of vacant land next to the 29-acre manufacturing site. On their most recent bills, they paid $518,373 to Monroe-Woodbury School District, $92,347 to Orange County and $62,943 to the Town of Woodbury.
The total for Harriman was $132,905, which is more than 11 percent of the village's tax levy. A reduction in that tax bill would be a tough blow for a community that has had double-digit tax increases for the past two years.
When will it come?
The layoff schedule shows three more rounds: July 31, Aug. 31 and Oct. 31. The final cut would eliminate the last four union workers, says the employee who left last week. He asked that his name be withheld because he doesn't want to jeopardize his severance pay.
All that workers have been doing lately, he says, is cleaning out storage tanks and other equipment. To him, it seems utterly implausible that the Nepera plant, a fixture in Harriman since 1942, will ever return to life.
"Everybody knows that we're going to be out of here."



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