Leesburg Cub Scout Pack 3729 led the pledge of allegiance at Monday’s Warsaw Common Council meeting. They also asked the council and Mayor Jeff Grose questions about their roles. Pictured from left are Otto Heavener, Claire Blackwell, Brooklyn Walker, Savaya Wright, Rion Pierce and Cub Leader Kari Blackwell. Photo by David Slone, Times-Union.

By David Slone
Times-Union

WARSAW — As part of a grant application to acquire funds to demolish the former Jomac Products buildings at the corner of Smith Street and Winona Avenue, the Warsaw Common Council approved a resolution Monday, April 15, designating the structures as blighted.

On March 15, the Warsaw Board of Public Works and Safety approved City Planner Justin Taylor’s request to apply for a Blight Clearance Grant of up to $500,000 through the Indiana Office of Community & Rural Affairs.

At Monday’s council meeting, Taylor presented the resolution classifying the buildings as blight. He said as part of the grant application to OCRA, which is for the demolition and removal of the blighted buildings, the resolution is required.

“This grant would enable the city to assist a nonprofit in the demolition of these structures without the city having to acquire the property or take any kind of ownership of the property. We just merely serve as a pass-through for the funds and through the (OCRA),” Taylor said.

The nonprofit is Fellowship Missions, which wants to demolish the Jomac buildings, build a new shelter at that location and then demolish its current shelter for a parking lot.

Donny Ritsema, senior community development planner with the Michiana Area Council of Governments, explained MACOG is a certified grant administrator through the state of Indiana and is helping the city of Warsaw apply for the OCRA grant.

He said OCRA has two calls for the Blight Clearance Program grants, with the first one just having opened up March 21. There are two stages for that — a proposal and a final application stage. Proposals are due April 26, with the final application due June 21 if the city is approved by OCRA to proceed to the final.

“For the Blight Clearance Program, we have to hit one of three national objectives. One of them is prevention or elimination of slum blight, and that’s what this particular project is trying to achieve,” Ritsema said. “And according to grant requirements, we can only pursue this particular national objective as long as an area is considered blight by resolution by the elected officials of the local community, so that’s what this particular resolution is for.”

The resolution designates three parcels as blighted conditions because of the deteriorating buildings and site contamination issues that have occurred over the years, he stated. The physical addresses of the buildings are 1624 and 1600 E. Winona Ave. and Smith Street, Warsaw, according to the resolution, and occupy approximately 2. 8 acres.

Councilwoman Diane Quance asked, “So basically a blighted property is one you would not want to restore and is in someway a hazard or unsightly or preventing further development from occurring?”

Ritsema said that was correct. “It’s helping to remediate those conditions so it can be repurposed or redeveloped into an active use again.”

Eric Lane, executive director and founder of Fellowship Missions, which operates a homeless shelter and an addiction recovery hub at 1520 E. Winona Ave., Warsaw, said Fellowship Missions has been at its current property for going on 10 years in September.

“With our numbers increasing, the way we serve our residents, especially with families and single parents, that’s one of the big reasons for the increase. Growth of services, but also we can create pods in here. We’ve been working with Design Collaborative out of Fort Wayne. We did some preliminary drawings to see what could fit on that property. We looked all over. We love that area. There’s a lot of things that are happening in that area that we would love to be a part of, especially with some of the revitalization and we feel like this project would fit great into that area,” he said.

Fellowship Missions has a lot of growing needs, he said, and they acquired the former Jomac property from Cardinal Services in 2023.

“I want to restore old, I don’t want to build new. We looked at it every which way we could and it would have just cost more to actually try to rehab pieces of that building because there’s some beautiful interior pieces … but we just can’t do that. And, like Justin said, with that basement being in there and some of the ground contaminating the water around there, we wouldn’t put a basement back in,” Lane said.

As part of the resolution approval process, a public hearing had to be held on it, but no one from the public spoke.

Ritsema then went through some comments as part of the public hearing, including that there will be a second public hearing at the second stage of the grant application.

He said MACOG has done a limited review of the building and they identified chlorinated solvents that were in the groundwater so there will be some level of remediation that will be needed for the project.

“There’s also documentation that there’s storage tanks underground of the property, so those also would have to be remediated for future development,” Ritsema said.

The city is involved because a nonprofit is not considered a direct eligible recipient for grant funds. Fellowship Missions would be considered a subrecipient with the city being the lead applicant and overseer of the funds if approved.

Ritsema said they are still working on getting more detailed cost estimates, but right now it is estimated for the demolition it will be $500,000 with a 10% local match required for a total project cost of $550,000. He said the costs could be more but the maximum grant request is $500,000. Fellowship Missions has verbally agreed to provide the local match, but the city may be asked to help, if possible, depending on what the final cost of the project is.

Quance asked if there was a date for the award to be announced. Ritsema said there’s no specific date but it’s usually a couple months after June 21. He said hopefully it’s before round two opens, which is in September, so if the project is not awarded in the first round they can apply for the second round of the grant.

After the public hearing of the resolution was closed, Councilwoman Cindy Dobbins made a motion to approve the resolution and Quance seconded it. The motion passed 6-0.