May 1—The owners of the former Tenneco plant in Kettering are making a multimillion-dollar investment in the site to update it for future use.
Parts of the 2555 Woodman Drive facility that was home to about 650 Tenneco jobs are being torn down in a phased project expected to continue into the summer, a company executive said.
The 128-acre property was vacated late last year after the auto parts maker announced in November 2021 that it would be closing the plant.
Industrial Commercial Properties (ICP) owns the 1.1-million square-foot facility with Industrial Realty Group (IRG).
The work is expected to cost "several million at this point," but no future user has been identified, said Dean Miller, an ICP senior vice president.
"What you're seeing out there is not about any one tenant. It's just part of a program for us," Miller said, noting "a long list of things that we want to be able to do to the building."
That includes getting "rid of the pieces that we can now to sort of de-industrialize and clean up the site," he said.
The demolition involves "incidental parts of some bigger buildings" to help "create a new aesthetic and a new feel for modern manufacturing there. And that's part of what you're seeing," Miller said.
"We definitely have conversations going on with potential users, but no imminent tenants, and we're not doing the work on behalf of a particular tenant right now," he added.
The goal is "to model our marketing of the property toward an updated look and feel for that facility, which we think will be good for everybody," he added.
"I think we want to be ready for various kinds of users that would come along," he said. "And we don't know whether it'll be one big user at this point, or more than one.
The owners are "trying to prepare in ... the most flexible or broadest possible way," Miller said. "So, you don't want to make investments at this time that are super specific ... or limit what you can do with the building in the future."
The Dayton Development Coalition helps promote the property for site selectors, Shannon Joyce Neal, a DDC vice president, told this news organization recently.
It "is unique site with a lot to offer the right user," she said in an email "It continues to generate interest from potential users, but we don't comment on site selection activity."
Several sections near the front of the property have been or are set to be demolished in three phases, according to city records.