Grants demolishes abandoned apartment buildings

Copyright © 2009
Gallup Independent
By Helen Davis
Cibola County Bureau

GRANTS — Grants residents are reaping the first rewards from an increase in garbage and sewer rates as an eyesore by the river comes down this week.

Demolition on a set of abandoned apartment buildings on the bank of the Rio San Jose at Washington Avenue across from Future Foundations Family Center began early this week and is expected to finish next week when Border Demolition of El Paso carts off the debris.

City councilors at the regular Grants council meeting Tuesday said it has taken two years since the council first decided to find cleanup money through the waste management fee increase, but now the demolition is finally happening.

City Manager Robert Horacek said the increase generates approximately $85,000 per year to pay removal contractors to tear down long-standing eyesores around town. The city does not have the equipment or licenses necessary to tear down buildings.

Demolition is not cheap. The Washington Avenue project will cost the city $66,189.38, said a spokesman for the city’s projects management department. The price of the work covers minor asbestos removable, which has already been performed; tear-down of the buildings, and removal of debris from the site.

Border Demolition won the contracting job in open bidding.

Removing all the decrepit or dangerous buildings the public repeatedly complains about will be a long project.

The cost of demolition and the steps necessary to allow a tear down limit the number of projects the city can take on in one year.

Before it can have a building it does not own taken down, the city must go through a long research and legal process. Horacek said buildings must be identified as undesirable, the owner located and the owner, if found, notified. Once the owner is located, he or she must be notified, and waiting period observed so the owner can request a hearing or take action on the build and other formal processes must be observed.

Only after all legal steps are completed, a call for bids put out and a bid approved in an open council meeting can demolition begin.