David Michael Miller
As the Oscar Mayer Company prepares to leave its longtime quarters in Madison, a city vision for the massive complex is beginning to take shape. Possibilities include the return of five city streets and purchase of the site for $1.
However, redeveloping the site will require soil remediation at a massive expense.
Oscar Mayer’s parent, Kraft Foods Group Inc., merged last year to form The Kraft Heinz Company. The resulting new organization announced in November that it would close a number of Oscar Mayer plants, including the manufacturing facility and company headquarters in Madison. Following an ongoing series of layoffs, all operations here will cease in March.
Mayor Paul Soglin cautions that it’s still very early to consider how the city could redevelop the site.
“Up until this point we’ve been pretty much focused on what I would call technical issues,” he says. “We have a general consensus that the property focus is on economic development and good jobs, and not housing. That’s the first thing.”
At its peak in the 1970s, Oscar Mayer employed 4,000 people in Madison. According to company documents, when the plant included stockyards the total facility spanned 170 acres. Today it covers almost 50 acres, which are assessed at $16.6 million. The land alone is assessed at $3.6 million. Annual property taxes are more than $404,000.
In reality, though, “the parcel has a negative value of between $10 and $20 million,” says Soglin. That includes the cost of anticipated remediation of contaminated soil; over decades the company hosted a wide variety of industrial activity.
In leaving Madison, Heinz Kraft caught the city’s Department of Planning & Community & Economic Development off guard. The city’s 2006 comprehensive plan didn’t anticipate any other use for the parcel since no one imagined that Oscar Mayer would depart. That oversight is now being corrected.
“The city does view it as an important piece of land, to continue to support strong employment opportunities that are well-served by transit, rail lines, the airport, and still within walking and biking distance of several residential areas,” says Heather Stouder, the city’s Planning Division director. For now, the site will continue to be zoned for industrial use.
The city’s Economic Development Division is taking the lead on planning, “but it is an interagency staff team that has been educating themselves about the site,” says Stouder. “Currently, the focus of our work is to learn more about situations in other cities similar to this one, and to work with [Kraft Heinz] to ensure that they understand the importance — from the city’s standpoint — of maintaining the site for future employment uses.”
The Oscar Mayer complex includes more than 20 separate structures. It began with one four-story building that had bad cork insulation.
Originally based in Chicago, the company’s expansion to Madison was, at the time, a bold industry innovation that led to fantastic growth over time. “The sequence of buildings and spaces accommodating specific use — basically the processing of meat — was designed over 100 years,” notes Soglin.
In 1919, 30-year-old Oscar G. Mayer, son of Bavarian immigrant founder, Oscar F. Mayer, was visiting relatives here when he learned of a defunct meat packing plant out in the country, far from what was then the edge of Madison’s east side. The farmers cooperative facility was 2 years old, and hadn’t operated in a year, due to financial difficulties.
Harvard-educated Oscar G. Mayer had an idea. Previously, meat packers located operations at railroad centers such as Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City. Livestock were shipped from rural areas to cities, where the animals were processed. Often they arrived in poor condition, owing to travel. Mayer would reverse that process, bringing operations close to farmers, and then using rail and roads to transport finished product to city markets.
He hurriedly went home to inform his father about the pending co-op sale. It would take one third of the company’s capital — nearly $14 million in today’s dollars, to purchase the plant and repair and replace equipment that had fallen into disrepair. Oscar senior had little time to consider, but “his son’s voice was filled with urgency,” recalls a company newsletter. “He put on his hat and caught a Madison-bound train.”
The company opened here Nov. 26, 1919. Headquarters were moved from Chicago in 1957. Major additions were built in 1925 and 1939, 1933, 1938, 1942, 1945, 1954, 1968 and 1970. At its peak, the complex was capable of processing as many as 10,000 hogs a day. In 1969, adjusted for inflation, its annual payroll for hourly and salaried employees totaled $256 million.
“In several respects, the large Madison plant is much like a self-sufficient city,” boasted the company newsletter that year. “Electricity generated by the plant’s powerhouse each week is equivalent to the electrical load used by 10,000 homes in the same period. Each week the plant uses about 35-million gallons of water,” equivalent to a single day’s use by all the rest of Madison at the time.
“Wastewater treatment facilities have a 4.5 million gallon daily capacity, easily enough to serve a community of 45,000 persons.”
Amazing in its day, that aging self-sufficient city will have to be dealt with before development occurs.
The city has not yet begun detailed planning for how to deal with the site, Stouder says. But some things are evident.
“In terms of utilization of the site, it appears that with the exception of one long single-story building, at the entrance to the campus, everything else would come down,” says Soglin. “The manufacturing part of the plant is of virtually no use to anyone.”
Not even the eight-story headquarters office building can be saved. Ironically, it’s doomed by the plant’s efficiency of operation.
“The entire facility has one [heating, ventilation and air conditioning] system, and so when the manufacturing portion of the plant is demolished, it leaves the offices without any HVAC,” says Soglin. “At that juncture, at which you’re already designing a new facility, whatever that may be, the cost of retrofitting the old offices with a new HVAC system is not cost-effective.”
Redevelopment will require private money. “The only interest we have in the city acquiring the site as owner is that the city would be eligible for Environmental Protection Agency funds to take care of any remediation of the soil,” says Soglin. “If demolition took place — everything removed, so that the only thing left to do was remediation — then the city would consider purchasing it for a dollar.”
The complex includes vacated portions of at least five city streets. “One of the possibilities is to restore those city streets,” says Soglin. “It depends on what the private use of them would be.”
The city has not been in touch with Oscar Mayer descendents, many of whom still live in the Madison area. Some sort of memorial will certainly be part of any future site, he says. But whatever happens, whether one or several industries take up residence on the site, it will take time.
Adds Soglin, “It’s possible that given its size it will take a decade or more to develop, and it would be done in stages.”
