Goldberg Foundry demolition may begin next month

Demolition of the former Goldberg Foundry will likely begin in early October, Grafton Community Development Director Gabe Gilbertson said Monday.

The Village Board last week approved a $198,800 bid from Firebird Construction of Milwaukee to demolish the former foundry at 1019-1025 11th Ave.

The company submitted the lowest of six bids for the work. 

All the bids were under the $650,000 budget for the project, which includes engineering services as well as demolition.

The village has received a $150,000 grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. to help pay for the demolition work.

Gilbertson said the engineering firm Bolton & Menk is currently drafting the contract papers, after which a preconstruction meeting will be held to iron out the schedule and any potential issues before demolition begins.

The demolition work will take the abandoned building down to the slab, Gilbertson said, after which the village will investigate what’s in the soil underneath it to determine if there is contamination that could require remediation.

“With its industrial use, I’m sure there were likely underground tanks or chemicals used that may have leached through the floors,” Gilbertson said in August.

The former foundry building, which was abandoned about 2003, is rapidly deteriorating, officials have said.

The stairs to the second floor of the building are in bad shape, the second floor of the office building has collapsed and portions of the roof of the warehouse have fallen in recently, Gilbertson said this summer. There’s no power to the building.

“There’s a lot of cool stuff in there that would be cool to salvage but I don’t know how you would get it out of there,” he said. “The building is just in very poor shape.”

The foundry is at the heart of the village’s newest tax incremental financing district, a 34-acre area northwest of downtown that contains a number of blighted properties.

  Gilbertson said it’s difficult to predict when the entire foundry site will be developed or what will be created there.

“Until the demolition is done and we have a better idea of the time frame ... that’s when we’ll start exploring those options,” he said. “I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.”

But the village won’t put the project on the back burner, Gilbertson said last month.

“The fact they created a TIF district puts the pressure on the village to keep moving forward,” he said.