Grant may put foundry site on development fast track
Could a long-vacant industrial site in Painted Post be on the fast track to new development?
The village was recently awarded funding through the Focused Attraction of Shovel-Ready Tracts New York grant program, known as FAST NY, which aims to jumpstart sites with the potential to land large employers and hightech manufacturing companies.
Painted Post is using the grant to prep 45 acres on West Water Street, at the site of the former Ingersoll-Rand foundry, for future development.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office said the Steuben County site has “regional significance” aided by close proximity to major highways. Its position in the Southern Tier allows for “easy integration into the regional advanced manufacturing cluster” and has the potential “to be a key semiconductor industry supply chain location.”
The site has been empty since 1985, when an iron foundry that produced castings for air compressors ceased operations. The land was then declared a brownfield and environmental remediation followed in the ensuing years.
The site has been targeted for redevelopment a few times over the last three-plus decades, but the village is hoping the FAST NY grant will finally give those efforts the right push.
“It would put an empty piece of property back on the tax rolls and be a tremendous boon for the village when it happens,” said Painted Post Mayor Ralph Foster. “Things have almost happened there and fallen through, or located somewhere else. We’re still hopeful.”
Foster described the FAST NY program as a “pre-development” grant, one that will fund projects that set the table for future investment at the site. Next steps include a site survey, site plan and design, and a traffic study.
Traffic concerns helped derail development proposals in the mid-2000s and again in 2021, when Tyoga Container Co. scrapped plans to build a 600,000square-foot warehouse and office facility.
Foster said the village is open to any project that’s a match for the site, whether it’s a company supporting the state’s nascent semiconductor industry or an entirely different industry. Some uses, though, are not possible at the site due to its industrial past. Foster said the land is “heavily deed restricted.”
“If you wanted to produce a food product on the site, there’s a deed restriction against it because the site was contaminated when the foundry existed there,” said Foster. “Most of it has been cleaned up since under a brownfield program.
“In the past we’ve had some folks come to us and we’ve gotten rather far into the process only to find out the particular use was deed restricted and the thing fell through. We want to be able to present a developer with a clear picture of what’s going to be considered a good candidate for the land use.”
Foster said the project will allow the village to market the site to developers through a state database for the first time.
“There’s a lot of worthwhile projects out there,” said the mayor. “We’d love to sell that property to somebody.”