Connersville to put $500,000 toward Visteon site cleanup

The city of Connersville will spend $500,000 to clean up the former Visteon site where a startup company wants to build
police cars.

Connersville officials and Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller announced an agreement Tuesday allowing
the city to use money in a trust fund that had been set aside for remediation at its landfill. The trust,
which holds about $862,000, was set up as part of a legal settlement with the Indiana Department of Environmental
Management over hazardous waste at the landfill. IDEM used the trust funds to cap the landfill, prevent
erosion and monitor groundwater.

According to the recent agreement, the site has "stabilized"
and IDEM agreed to release the money to the city. Connersville had paid $600,000 into the trust. The
city will hold the money in an account for long-term landfill maintenance, which does not include groundwater
monitoring, and spend as much as $500,000 on the Visteon site.

IDEM has said the Visteon site cleanup will cost as much
as $4 million. As IBJ reported
this fall, the city wants to hand the project off to an environmental-liability transfer company,
which would manage the cleanup and assume all costs and responsibility in exchange for an up-front fee. It’s unclear how the
city and state would finance such a transaction.

The police-car maker Carbon Motors says it could create 1,500 jobs
in three years, but the company can’t use the Visteon site, which was vacated in 2007, until all legal
and environmental questions are settled. Carbon Motors also needs to line up financing. The company applied
for a $310 million Department of Energy loan and is trying to negotiate a package of tax breaks with the Indiana Economic
Development Corp.