Attleboro jewelry site in need of remediation
A deal between Swank Inc. and the Attleboro Redevelopment Authority is expected to put one of the city’s largest manufacturing facilities back in business – as a Stern Metals jewelry-making plant – and create 300 new jobs.
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Swank agreed to sell the vacant 190,000-square-foot facility for $1, Chief Financial Officer Jerry Kassner said, to avoid potential environmental liabilities.
Swank has owned the plant since 1936, but ceased manufacturing there in 2000 and fully moved out in 2004.
Cookson Precious Metals, Stern’s parent company and owner of a facility next door, has been negotiating with Swank to buy the site, but uncertainty over the extent of contamination has been a stumbling block, Kassner said.
The seller “usually bears responsibility” for cleanup costs, he said, and no one knows how big a task that could turn into. “The incentive for us [to sell for $1] was that the city, with the Redevelopment Authority, would conduct environmental remediation at their cost.”
Michael Milanoski, executive director of the Redevelopment Authority, said the agency had already been acting as a liaison between the company when it decided to purchase the two-acre site and five acres of abutting property to facilitate the deal.
The plan is for the agency to pay for testing and environmental remediation of the site, using state and federal grants, then sell it to Cookson for $1 million, Milanoski said.
“We didn’t want it to remain vacant,” he said. “We applied for and received many grants for the project, specifically for this property.”
The Redevelopment Authority raised more than $5 million in grants and guaranteed loans from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, MassDevelopment, the Massachusetts Office of Business Development, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office, Milanoski said.
Milanoski called it a “true” public/private partnership.
Environmental testing will begin next month, Milanoski said. The Redevelopment Authority has hired consultants to drill test wells throughout the property to evaluate the soil, vapors and groundwater for contamination. Remediation will begin next year.
It is unclear what the tests may find, or how extensive the cleanup will have to be, Milanoski said. “Until we do the testing, we can’t identify what the causes were.”
Based in New York, Swank employs 250 people and had $97 million in sales last year.
The company imports and sells men’s jewelry, belts and wallets to major department stores under brands such as Kenneth Cole, Tommy Hilfiger and Nautica.
Until March of 2000, Swank made costume jewelry at the Attleboro plant, but competitive pressures forced it to shut down its manufacturing operations and import all its merchandise, Kassner said. About 500 people were laid off.
“Most of our competition had been importing jewelry for quite some time,” Kassner said. “It’s hard to compete with goods being brought in from the Far East.”
Though Swank continued to pay for maintenance, utilities and taxes, it no longer used the 100-year-old facility except to house a few administrative offices, which moved in 2004.
“We had been thinking of what to do” with the plant, Kassner said. Selling to Cookson looked like a good option, but the two companies couldn’t agree on price and other issues. “The Attleboro Redevelopment Authority approached us with a creative approach that made sense to us,” Kassner said.
Cookson Precious Metals President and CEO Richard Powers said the company plans to use the Swank facility for manufacturing and as a warehouse and distribution center.
“Consolidating will reduce operating costs in terms of transportation, security, insurance and inventory costs,” Powers said, adding that those things are more of an issue because the company handles high-value precious metals.
Cookson Precious Metals is a division of Cookson Group plc, a London-based chemicals and metals company whose U.S. headquarters are in Providence. (Rhode Island Gov. Donald L. Carcieri used to be CEO of Cookson America.)
Cookson Precious Metals manufactures semi-finished and finished jewelry as well as jewelry components for other jewelry manufacturers.
“We absolutely needed more space to leverage for future growth, for future acquisitions,” said Marc Forbes, president of Cookson’s Masters of Design group.
Buying the Swank facility will allow the company to “optimize” its labor force, which consists of roughly 700 employees in the company’s two existing Attleboro facilities, he said. That means a polisher skilled in one area could be trained to polish in another area as high production periods shift from area to area within one consolidated manufacturing plant.
“This was our first public/private partnership,” Forbes said of the partnership with the Redevelopment Authority. “It was very beneficial to us for our long-term strategic goals.”
