Demolition of former GM plant has begun, with the state giving Janesville $500,000 to help

JANESVILLE – Two hundred and fifty thousand square feet of factory reduced to rubble and scrap, 4.5 million to go.

Under the experienced eye of a Kentuckian with a soft drawl and 37 years of big-demo under his belt, the former General Motors auto plant, once the economic bedrock of this community, is being ripped, grappled, twisted and crushed to bits.

It’s a two-year job that started last month and is expected to level the entire, sprawling manufacturing complex, opening 265 acres to redevelopment. There, officials expect to see a series of newly built, job-generating factories and warehouses rise.

That’s the hope for the future, anyway. For now, the place belongs to Dennis Johnson.

Sixty-five years old and a resident of Ashland, Ky. — when he’s not tearing down mothballed factories, power plants and other pieces of America’s industrial legacy — Johnson is project manager for the GM demolition.

It’s the ninth General Motors plant he’s helped raze.

“I tore the sister plant to this down five years ago in Baltimore,” Johnson said as he stood amid a post-apocalyptic landscape heaped with piles of steel, aluminum, copper and electric motors. “That’s almost the exact same footprint — everything.”

Johnson works for St. Louis-based Commercial Development Co. Inc., which bought the entire GM site in December. The firm paid $9.6 million for the property. Demolition will cost another $10 million or so, executive vice president Colleen Kokas said.

On Wednesday, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. announced that it has awarded the City of Janesville $500,000 to help with the project.

More than 5,000 employees of GM and its suppliers lost their jobs when the automaker began winding down production in Janesville in 2008 and shut the doors for good the following year. The idling of the vast plant — 4.8 million square feet — hit Janesville’s economy hard and left a huge hole on the city’s south side.

The sale to Commercial Development Co., though, is a step on the path to reclaiming the site, which became a GM factory in 1918 that went on to employ generations of the same Wisconsin families.

Commercial Development Co. specializes in rejuvenating old industrial sites. Since 1990, it has bought and redeveloped or sold more than 200 pieces of problem real estate, including shuttered factories, quarries and chemical plants.

The firm envisions 1 million square feet of new industrial space on the former GM property. First, though, hundreds of millions of pounds — at least — of steel and brick must come down.

“It’s kind of broke into segments,” Johnson said of the work going on Wednesday among what once were paint booths and ovens that baked finishes onto Chevrolet Suburbans and GMC Yukons. “You got a demo crew up there. You got a cleaning crew in the middle, and then” on the perimeter, operators of heavy tracked vehicles fitted with grappling arms and shears cut the scrap and pile it by type of metal for eventual sale.

The factory, which once supported thousands of families, now is valuable chiefly for the tons of scrap steel and other metal it holds. Johnson ticked off the inventory.

“You get aluminum, get stainless, copper, brass,” he said. “You try to accumulate as much as possible and then you sell a full truckload.”

The scrap sales have already begun.

“I think we’ll probably ship 4,000 tons of steel out of here this month,” Johnson said. All told, he thinks the plant will yield 70,000 tons of steel — 140 million pounds — along with a couple million pounds of copper and thousands of pounds of aluminum.

“It’s a lot,” he said. “I mean, you could retire on it.”

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As big as the former GM plant was, the wrecking work is relatively straightforward, Johnson said.

“We did a power plant before this, which was technically way beyond this,” he said. “This one, in the demo world, is actually easy.”

The $500,000 Idle Sites Redevopment Grant from WEDC will “expedite the transformation” of the GM property, said John Fonke, executive vice president of real estate for Commercial Development Co.

“We believe big things are ahead for Janesville and Rock County,” he said.

The area has rebounded somewhat from the economic shock of the plant closing. Since 2009, Rock County has added private-sector jobs at a much faster pace than Wisconsin as a whole. But as of last December, the county still hadn’t regained the employment level of 2007, the year before GM began the shutdown.

Meanwhile, Rock County’s average wage, which tracked Wisconsin’s average during the early 2000s, has fallen behind the statewide figure since the big factory closed.

Earlier this week, Janesville took a small step backward on the jobs front, as Ariens Co. said it will shutter a distribution and direct-marketing center that employs about 140 people.

RELATED:More than 200 jobs to be lost as Madison, Janesville businesses close

But public officials and the new owner of the GM property are optimistic about the future. And the demolition, at least, appears to be in practiced hands.

“This is all I’ve done for 37 years,” Johnson said.

He has overseen complicated demolition all over the country, and this isn’t even his first time in what he refers to as “Wes-consin.”

“I’ve been to the West Coast, East Coast,” Johnson said. “I’ve worked in Green Bay before, and I’ve worked in Miami, so I’ve pretty well covered it.”

The Green Bay project? It was at Lambeau Field several years ago.

“They built the new skyboxes during the summer and then after the season we ripped out the old skyboxes,” Johnson said.

That sounds like a solid credential. Anyone who’s been entrusted to work on Wes-consin’s football shrine probably knows what he’s doing.