The Columbus City Council unanimously approved a $6,888 change order to the Gilmer Inn demolition during Tuesday’s meeting.
The Gilmer Inn, located at the northeast corner of the Main Street-Fourth Street South intersection, was torn down during the summer. The city purchased it and the adjoining Brumley building late last year for a combined $675,000, with a $8,500 donation from the Columbus-Lowndes Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Building demolition finished last month. The former building grounds have been seeded and converted to green space.
J5 Broaddus Senior Project Manager Robyn Eastman said the project contractor, Tuscaloosa, Alabama-based Southern Civil Engineering, found six large concrete slabs buried as part of the building’s foundation. Eastman said the slabs were six feet wide, two feet deep and 22 feet long.
The slabs have since been removed, Eastman said.
“No one could have seen that would be there,” he told The Dispatch after the meeting. “So we had to get it out and [the city] compensate the contractor for the extra work.”
The city awarded Southern Civil a $181,000 contract for the project earlier this year.
Also at Tuesday’s meeting, a citizen thanked the council for taking action on the Seventh Avenue Ditch.
Work will begin soon on the $3.3 million project, which will see 935 feet of the ditch, from a box culvert near Maranatha Faith Center to another culvert where Seventh Avenue North connects to Propst Park. A box culvert will be installed along the ditch, which is currently open. Once the project is complete, the ditch will be closed off and covered with dirt.
The ditch flows from the former Kerr-McGee on 14th Avenue North. Kerr-McGee and its successor, Tronox, operated a chemical processing facility at the site from 1928 to 2003.
The facility produced railroad cross ties. Since its close, the site has been discovered as the source of environmental contamination — primarily from creosote — and sealed off.
The citizen, Margaret Ann Evans, said she has lived in the area for decades years and believes it’s long past time to fix the ditch. She said she once fell in creosote in the ditch and once stepped in it.
“As small kids we played in there under the bridges,” she said. “I fell in it once and stepped in it once and had the creosote on me.
“I want to thank y’all for approving something now that should have been done years and years ago,” she later added.
The project is being funded through a $68 million Columbus received as part of a settlement of a federal lawsuit against Kerr-McGee. The Greenfield Environmental Multistate Trust, which manages more than 400 former Kerr-McGee sites in 24 states with $5.5 billion from the settlement, is overseeing the project.
In other business, the council:
■ appointed Rob Graham to the Zoning Board of Adjustments and Appeals; and
■ reappointed Macarthur Inge, Chuck Bigelow and Larry Fuller to the City Planning Commission.
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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