Published Friday, September 20, 2002
was March 6, state says
Herald Business Editor
Standing in Keystone Industrial Park in Crawford County during the spring of 2000, former Gov. Tom Ridge announced that Winner Development LLC of Sharon had been awarded a $7 million state grant.
The grant was earmarked for a $77 million redevelopment of Westinghouse Electric Corp.'s former Sharon Transformer Division plant on Sharpsville Avenue in Sharon.
On hand for the event was James E. Winner Jr., who owns the development company.
"You won't be sorry,'' Winner told Ridge.
"I know I won't be,'' Ridge responded.
Ridge is gone from Pennsylvania. He has gone to Washington as director of Homeland Security.
Also gone is the $7 million grant.
State officials have notified local development agencies and Winner Development that they have withdrawn the funds.
"The project that the money was committed to in our view doesn't exist anymore,'' said Mike Lukens, deputy press secretary for Gov. Mark S. Schweiker. "We have nothing to indicate the project exists.''
He said the project, which called for a huge multi-tenant industrial park, has been slashed to an estimated $18 million project. Further, Lukens said, specific information about the project was never provided, even though the state constantly asked for it.
"There was information we needed to back up the project and we hadn't gotten it,'' Lukens said Thursday. "It got to the point we felt it was time to withdraw the funding.''
The grant was a done deal as long as the information the state sought, such as proof that matching funds were in place and engineers' drawings of the project, was provided. The grant was from the Redevelopment Assistance Capital program, better known as the stadium fund because a large chunk of the money was earmarked to build stadiums in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
Money once set aside for the Westinghouse project will go back into the stadium fund, Lukens said.
If Winner Development wants another crack at a state grant under the program, it must reapply, Lukens said.
Local development agencies received a letter Monday from state budget Secretary Robert Bittenbender saying conditions for Winner Development securing the grant expired March 6.
Lukens said the six-month delay in making the announcement was an oversight.
"It was a housekeeping kind of thing,'' Lukens said. "We have a lot of paperwork and a lot of work that goes with it. It was a combination of factors. This project just came back on somebody's screen this summer.''
It was unclear Thursday how the loss of the $7 million would affect the project. Calls to Winner's office were not returned.
Lukens said if Winner Development reapplies for the grant, state officials will take a look at the scaled-down project. But, he said, there is no way the state can commit funds to any project without the required information in hand.
"When we went to look for information to support this project, it wasn't there,'' he said.
Charles "Chuck'' Bestwick, chairman of Mercer County Industrial Development Authority, made that same complaint for more than a year.
MCIDA, which was completing the grant application, notified Winner Development last year that the state had set 21 conditions before it would release the money and those conditions were never met.
In June MCIDA sued Winner Development for more than $31,000 that the agency said it was owed for legal and administrative expenses in trying to complete the grant. Winner said at the time he had paid all his bills in full.
The disputed amount now totals about $16,000 and appears headed for court-supervised arbitration.
"All the state is doing is what we told the company in March -- that it had to provide information about the project,'' Bestwick said. He added Winner Development had received a couple of extensions but the state was clear the March 6 deadline was firm.
The grant's withdrawal came as a surprise to Bestwick and others who had been told by state officials as late as a few weeks ago that the funding was still in place. Sharon council resurrected a city industrial development authority to complete the grant application and members had been meeting for a month. Since the grant has vaporized, the future of the authority is unclear. Authority Chairman John Dolan was out of town and not available for comment.
Although Winner openly criticized MCIDA and Bestwick for being uncooperative in completing the application, Bestwick said he doesn't feel as if he's been vindicated by the state's action.
"I feel very badly about what has happened,'' Bestwick said. "I feel I did what I was mandated to do from the outset. We were involved in a project that failed through no fault of our own.
"In the end, it's the community that loses.''