Yet another feud surfaced Friday between Mercer County Industrial Development Authority and Winner Development LLC with the agency insisting the company owes it $30,500 in past-due fees and the company's chairman asserting he's paid up in full and won't pay another penny.

Winner Development owes fees for work MCIDA performed in its behalf in preparing an application for a $7 million state grant for the company, MCIDA said. The grant was to be used to redevelop the former Westinghouse Electric Corp. plant in Sharon.

Board members talked about recent developments surrounding the abandoned plant at their regular monthly meeting at the Hickory VFW in Hermitage on Friday.

Last week James E. Winner Jr., chairman of Winner Development, said his company was no longer trying to secure the state grant for creating a multi-tenant industrial park at the plant along Sharpsville Avenue. For more than a year MCIDA said Winner didn't provide information required by the state. An extension to complete an application expired Thursday.

Over the last year, Winner complained that MCIDA had stymied the project but he has been reserved in recent comments about the agency.

During a question and answer session Friday, reporters learned from MCIDA's administrator that Winner Development owes $30,495 in fees associated with the project. The company signed an agreement to pay the fees, which also include attorney fees and travel costs related to the grant, administrators said.

Winner has paid no fees since January 2001, according to MCIDA which didn't aggressively seek payment.

"We certainly didn't want that to be the reason the project didn't work out,'' said MCIDA Chairman Charles Bestwick.

He said most of the fees stem from the "excessive time" spent on the project due to the lack of information provided by Winner Development. He added that MCIDA will now seek to recoup those fees.

No other company has ever failed to pay fees it owed for a development project, Bestwick said.

Winner didn't attend Friday's meeting but in a brief phone interview later said the contract his company has with MCIDA called for him to fork over a little more than $10,000 which he paid.

He added he was aware MCIDA contends his company owes the agency $30,500.

"Our position is we don't owe them nothing,'' Winner said. "If we owed them we certainly would pay them.''

Winner said he still wants to forge ahead with the project without the grant and will continue with an environmental cleanup at the site. The cleanup has an estimated $6.5 million price tag with about $3.5 million yet to be spent on the work.

At MCIDA's meeting Bestwick said the agency still wants to work with Winner Development on the project.

"We know something needs to be done with that property,'' Bestwick said. "We need to discuss with Mr. Winner the future of the project.''

He also said the agency would labor to see if the state grant could be used for another local project.

The state awarded the grant as part of the Redevelopment Assistance Capital program. The state must now decide the future of those funds, Bestwick said.

Larry Reichard, executive director of Penn-Northwest Development Corp., said the funds must go to a project previously approved by the state under the Redevelopment program. Penn-Northwest is the lead economic development agency for Mercer County and is the administrator for MCIDA.

Two local projects that could qualify 1/4are Shenango Valley Industrial Development Corp.'s Broadway corridor improvement plan and Mercer County Area Agency on Aging Inc.'s senior center in Hermitage.

William McKnight, an MCIDA board member, credited Winner for his work in other local development efforts and Bestwick and others for their work. "It's just too bad the (Westinghouse) project ended the way it did, McKnight said.