Before it even got a chance to officially open, Narragansett Pellet Corp. has been forced to shut down and release 33 employees.
On Oct. 11, the company received an order to cease operations from the City of East Providence’s Building Inspection Division, said Bill Carden, president of Narragansett Pellet, which incorporated in January.
Two days later, the company received a letter from the East Providence Fire Department, reiterating the cease-operations order, and adding that the company must remove all wood shavings, chippings and soybean oil for lubricating the machines from the premises.
Meanwhile, the East Providence-based manufacturer has already invested $3.9 million in renovating its 75,000-square-foot facility, Carden said, and added 1,200 feet of conveyors to transport the wood waste through a system that would lead to their eventual compression into wood fuel pellets for pellet burning stoves.
“All the equipment has been tested,” he said. “If we got our temporary certificate of occupancy today, we would start tomorrow morning.”
Carden said the company is already six weeks behind in shipments, with customers calling and asking where the product is.
“I don’t understand it,” he said. “They let us go all the way to the point where we built this operation, and then they came in and shut us down.”
The company received a building permit from the city, dated May 23, and a copy of plans stamped “approved for construction” from the building inspector’s office, Carden said.
But disagreements have followed.
On Sept. 27, Capt. David Rave of the Fire Department sent a letter stating: “I don’t know why you would have received the building permit on the same day that you submitted your plans to the Fire Department for review .… the Fire Department has not given approval to this project. We did not sign the building permit that is on file with the building official.”
Carden said his company responded to that letter, and to the 18 fire code deficiencies it listed, with a letter that gave a plan of action for addressing each deficiency and a timeline.
Rave requested that the company design and build a dust-collecting system and design protection for soybean oil totes, among many other technical provisions, according to the Sept. 27 letter.
“The question is not will Narragansett Pellet comply,” Carden said. “But we can’t do everything they want us to do immediately.”
And in order to comply with the Fire Department’s requests, he said, his company needs a temporary certificate of occupancy so it can acquire funding to pay for the improvements.
The company filed an 18-page complaint last week in Superior Court, Providence, naming as defendants Albert Quattrucci, the city’s building official; Joseph Klucznik, chief of the East Providence Fire Department; and Rave.
(Rave could not be reached for comment; his office stated that he was unavailable. Quattrucci also could not be reached for comment, as he was on vacation.)
The company also filed a motion asking the court to order city officials to “cease and desist from interfering with the issuance of a certificate of occupancy.”
Carden said he will sue the city for damages, if he has to.
The company has been waiting since Sept. 11 for a temporary certificate of occupancy.
“If I don’t get a temporary C.O. pretty soon, we’re going to go bankrupt,” Carden said.
