RICHMOND — The I-Team pressed the Mayor of Richmond on Friday for answers on the city’s years-long legal battle with the plastics facility property owner.
News Center 7′s I-Team lead investigative reporter, John Bedell, went to the Wayne County Administration building Friday to obtain new public records.
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The document shows the city bought two-thirds of the properties that burned for $250.00 a piece at a tax sale in 2021, spending a total of $500.00 in public money.
Those properties are located at 358 and 310 NW F Street. Cornerstone Trading Group, LLC still owns the property at 308 NW F Street.
Friday, the I-Team got new information from the city where the fire started.
“358 is what we were dispatched to,” Chief Tim Brown, Richmond Fire Department, said.
The city owns that property. The I-team asked who had access to the property, if anybody was moving around that property, and if anybody was at the scene when the fire started.
Mayor Dave Snow said no city officials were at the site when the fire broke out and did not know if any workers were there when firefighters arrived.
“When we arrived on site there were a few workers. I don’t have the exact number as to how many workers were there,” Chief Brown said.
During Friday’s press conference, the I-Team asked the Mayor about the cost of the clean-up and who was going to be paying for it.
“That’s what we’re going to shift our attention to,” Snow said.
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The Mayor said the focus right now is first getting the hot spots out.
“We want to get people back into their homes. They need to get back to their lives and so that’s where our attention is,” Snow said.
When asked again about who was paying for the clean-up, Snow said, “Well as I’ve said before, the business owner is responsbile.”
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The I-Team again went to the lawyer’s office listed for the property owner in the court documents, and they again said, “no comment.”
The document trail the I-Team found showed the business owner had ignored orders from the city and a judge. As the press conference ended, Mayor Snow did say that they filed for a grant to start the clean-up and had been working with the business owner. However, he was reluctant to answer any further questions regarding who will pay for the clean-up.
The city attorney, A.J. Sickmann, pulled into the lot after the press conference, and the I-Team approached him, asking him the same questions as the mayor about asking the court for the ability to clean up the site themselves.
“We did not need to do that because the unsafe building law allows for us to undertake that action ourselves if the property owner fails to do it. The issue was gaining access to the site, and we couldn’t do that until we gained control of at least two of them. But even then, the materials were so expansive that we really couldn’t even get in to evaluate the materials that were there,” Sickman said
After the tax sale, that allowed that city to access the site, as they could not do so beforehand.
“Truckloads were going out on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, we just didn’t have enough time to get that done before the fire happened,” Sickmann said
The city was directing the property’s owner to clean up the site and was monitoring it, Sickmann told the I-Team.
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