Kinston to ask for bids to remove power plant asbestos

City leaders will ask for cost estimates on removing asbestos stored in the city’s old electric power plant, but are not considering razing the historic building.

“I spoke with the (city) manager this morning,” said Scott Stevens, director of Kinston’s Public Services Department. “Neither of us has any intention to tear it down.”

Stevens said a representative from the state was in Kinston last week to advise about the best ways to handle asbestos removal.

City leaders had the building sealed off in the 1980s, Stevens said. They were told at that time the cleanup could cost about $1 million.

Since then, windows have been broken and anyone wanting to explore its interior had easy access. Children reportedly were playing inside where deteriorating boxes and bags of asbestos were stored.

The city recently boarded up the first-floor windows.

“It will probably cost ten to fifteen thousand dollars to go through the bid process to get someone to clean it up,” Stevens said. “We should know in the summer what the real cost of cleanup would be.”

The future of the building after cleanup is uncertain but the city would have to take care of the asbestos regardless of the power plant’s future. The city’s liability would decrease significantly with the asbestos gone. Presently, the liability could be great if a wall collapsed or the roof caved in.

City Council members expressed those fears when they met in February for a planning session.

However, Stevens doesn’t expect any such catastrophic event. The building is structurally sound, he told council members at that time.

“The clean-up would have to be done whether we renovate it or tear it down,” Stevens said. “We hope to clean it up and do something with it.”

Stevens said he has no idea about the property’s value. Although a large plot of land surrounds the building, the city would retain most of the property if the building were sold. Wells are on the east side of the plant and a substation is in the rear. Stevens estimated that about two acres of land in the front could go to any buyer who wanted to purchase the building.

“I have no idea how much it’s worth,” he said. “Anybody who would take it, it would take so much effort to get it into decent shape. If somebody had a use for it and were going to put it to good purpose, I sort of expect the council would be willing to listen.”

Renovating the building for use as a bar, a restaurant or even for offices would be possible, Stevens said. Constructing a building with the same features as those in the power plant would be almost prohibitively expensive, he said.

“It has a lot of interesting stuff you couldn’t afford to build today,” Stevens said.

Kinston Power Plant, according to “Coastal Plain and Fancy,” a publication of the Lenoir County Historical Association, was built between 1903 and 1906 to replace the small Kinston Electric Light and Water Works on the southeast corner of West Bright and South Herritage streets. The new power plant went up at 900 Atlantic Ave. It was expanded between 1926 and 1930.