GM plans ‘garage sale’ for toxic plants, New Jersey golf course

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: As General Motors Corp prepares to sell its best assets to a streamlined new entity, the worst of what it owns will be auctioned off in bankruptcy court, including contaminated factory sites, parking lots in Flint, Michigan, and a nine-hole golf course in New Jersey.

One property the carmaker is ditching is a foundry in Massena, New York, bordered on the east by the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation and on the north by the St Lawrence River. Built to make aluminum cylinder heads for the Chevrolet Corvair in the 1950s, it generated PCB sludge and waste from hydraulic fluids.

“It was created by GM dumping hazardous waste on the banks of the river, such that the waste oozed into the water and the land,” said John Privitera, a lawyer for the tribe at McNamee Lochner Titus & Williams PC in Albany, New York. “It was picked up by animals and moved up the food chain through fish and into Mohawk women— into their breast milk, into their babies.”

The largest U.S. automaker, following its smaller rival Chrysler LLC, is using the bankruptcy process to spin off a new entity with reduced costs and debt while leaving the old GM with unwanted property and obligations to creditors, dealers, retirees, accident victims and environmental agencies.

The discarded assets will be all that creditors have to satisfy their claims as GM starts to unwind liabilities of $172.8 billion—more than twice its reported assets.

The pollutants at the Massena site wound up in the St Lawrence River, migrated to the reservation and put the property in the New York State Registry of Hazardous Waste Sites and on the federal superfund list of contaminated places. While the Massena site is eligible for federal cleanup money, according to Privitera, some of the cost may come out of creditors’ hide, a GM restructuring official testified.

It would cost GM as much as $225 million to clean up the site and restock the river with edible fish if it held on to the property, Privitera estimated.

At the first day of hearings on GM’s proposed asset sale restructuring chief Albert Koch estimated on June 30 that the company’s environmental liabilities for all sites are $530 million.