Fieldhouse sale deal falls through

The Basketball Fieldhouse in the Purdue Research Park will soon be turned over to the Town of Merrillville.

Councilman Shawn Pettit, D-6th, said the South Korean company Oh Pharmaceuticals will not purchase the 52,475square-foot building from the Purdue Research Foundation as planned.

He said the foundation will now give the property back to the town’s Redevelopment Commission and the Broadway tax increment financing district.

“We need to instruct (town attorney) Joe Svetanoff to get two appraisals then we’ll decide what to do with the building,” Pettit said at a recent meeting held via conference call. The foundation had given Oh Pharmaceuticals until March 31 to purchase the building or it would be returned to the town.

Bill Barnes, operations and entrepreneurial manager for the research park, could not be reached for comment.

In 2014, the town authorized the sale of bonds to finance the purchase of the building for $3.2 million. The town then transferred the property to the Purdue Research Foundation, which has been leasing the property to Oh Pharmaceuticals and paying the taxes on the property.

If the company had purchased the property, Purdue would have given the town the money to pay off the bonds. Pettit said Merrillville would probably sell the property to pay the bonds.

Oh is the inventor of an injectable drug delivery system used in hospitals and medical clinics that the company manufactures.

A company spokesman said it would bring 50 high skilled jobs, primarily chemical engineers, in the first three years, with the possibility of increasing that number to 130 after that.

Barnes said previously that it was hoped that the company would have moved in to the building by March 31. He said there were a lot of unanticipated issues the company had to overcome.

Karen Caffarini is a freelance reporter for the PostTribune.