While we’re in Davidson County, the City of Lexington is trying to figure out what to do with the former Lexington Furniture Plant 1. None of the options are good, according to Carolina Investment Properties president Robin Team. It’s definitely a government project waiting to happen:

The city council voted last November to purchase the five-block-long, at points three-block-deep, site for $1.05 million. The contract gave the city a due diligence period to study the site, but the time runs out this week. With several issues still unresolved, the city now has another month to conclude the deal…..

But with solvents and finishes used for a century at the plant, more environmental problems are anticipated. Team said city representatives have received verbal assurance that the site will be accepted into the N.C. Brownfield Program. He did not estimate the cleanup cost but said state and federal grants likely will pay for it without cost to the city. Grants may also pay $3 million to $4 million in demolition costs, he said…..

Team said the mutually exclusive provisions, plus potential liability issues, discourage private acquisition of the plant site. “As far as I’m concerned, this property is caught between a rock and a hard place, and there’s not really much that can be done with it,” Team said.

This last part is for our man Jeff Taylor down on The Meck Deck. He’ll get it:

Team compared the opportunity to one 15 years ago, when Davidson County officials proposed moving the main county government campus out of Lexington, the county seat, and Lexington officials and business leaders convinced them to expand in Lexington instead.

He also said he envies Kannapolis, the former textile manufacturing town that razed more than a million square feet of former mill buildings to begin establishing a biotech center financed largely by one man’s $1 billion investment.

“While we don’t have a sugar daddy like David Murdock, we have the same opportunity,” Team said.