Wide open space in Vermilion will be something, but not an Amazon facility

VERMILION — The 119-acre parcel along Baumhart Road near state Route 2 might have lost out on a major development deal last year but it won't stay untouched much longer, predicts Mayor Jim Forthofer. The spot — with the Ohio Turnpike nearby, railroad tracks and land — is the most prime spot for miles around on the lake shore, Forthofer said, and his office gets calls continuously from developers interested in the area. "It's very active," he said, while he said that he cannot give details. "It will definitely not stay vacant for long, I assure you." In recent years there was only one name that bandied about in this area, an unusual one when you look at what is there now, fields of green pasture and farmland that has stood for time immemorial here: Amazon, the biggest commercial presence in America. Rumors were rife here in 2021 that Amazon was going to be the newest neighbor in this town of 10,000, setting up what could have been perhaps its biggest distribution center in a cornfield just down the road from the shore of Lake Erie and across the street from where Ford Motor Co., another mammoth American employer, once slammed its doors shut and called it a night, altering a small town's economic foundation. City officials were cautious to never publicly acknowledge the Amazon buzz, though: "a major distribution center" was the most that was said. The names of the developers interested, a Detroit company and a well-heeled Dallas-based firm, working in tandem, were behind the interest, on behalf of their client, the unnamed distributor that wanted to build a 1.4-miillion-square-foot warehouse space. Proposed plans called for about 1,000 employee parking spaces, and 700 or so spots for trailer trucks. Numbers like that made people talk and speculate. "It would be a game-changer," Forthofer called it, often. When they asked the city to change the zoning to light industrial and to increase the building height allowances to 65 feet instead of 45 height, the people in the neighborhood alongside the property got a little upset. But still — "nobody said it was Amazon. We never got that confirmation, and we never said that it was Amazon," Forthofer said, many times. In December of 2021, City Council and the Planning Commission had approved the zoning changes and the project and just as the new year came around, a handful of residents filed petitions to City Council, asking for a referendum to be placed on the ballot asking that the matters go to a vote. Following procedure, the city's finance director had 10 days to review the petitions before sending along to the Lorain and Erie counties' boards of elections, which would then certify the petitions to go to the ballot. But Finance Director Amy Hendricks found "fatal flaws" in the petitions, finding them problematic in the wording and way they were collected and presented to signers. She reviewed her findings with Forthofer and Law Director Susan Keating Anderson, and Anderson concurred with her decision not to return the petitions to the counties to place on the ballot. The respective counties did validate the signatures. Had the matter gone to ballot, it would have been up for a vote last November, and until then City Council's actions would have been frozen. In the meantime, the prospective occupant lost interest. "The interested party said 'We have other stuff to do' and they moved on," Forthofer said. "What they wanted to block, the zoning changes, has already been done," he said. "What they wanted to do was to run off that project and they did just by the threat of a referendum. Just the threat delayed the project, and it made any development leave." Other news sources, however, have identified the interested party was Amazon. Residents have raised concerns about the increase in traffic, noise and potential pollution changing their bucolic lifestyle and changing the scenery abutting their pastoral setting, behind a historic country church. But Forthofer points out that the front of the parcel along Baumhart was once bustling around the clock when the Ford plant was in production. Many of the inquiries that have come have asked about utilities, which could indicate manufacturing facilities rather than distribution warehouses, he has said previously. "It was non-polluting. It was clean. And the idea was to help the tax base of this city," he said. "The original developer, they are penciling other occupants to lease or sell it to. My role, according to them, is not to make potential candidates public but they assure me the site is very active. Between Cleveland and Sandusky the site is the most prime site available. It could be a fulfillment center, an office park, a battery plant, an automotive supply plant, a manufacturing plant. Without a doubt." Contact Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.