Mt. Pleasant Center Demolition Project

In 2009, the Mt. Pleasant Regional Center for Developmental Disabilities shut its doors after more than 70 years in the community, leaving more than 20 buildings on the center’s 300-acre property vacant. The property was owned by the State of Michigan and eventually given over to the City of Mt. Pleasant, who boarded up the buildings while waiting on a decision and funding for what to with this large piece of property just outside of downtown Mt. Pleasant. Eventually, the buildings were deemed unusable, suffering from age, weather, and vandalism, and the City moved towards making the property more developmentally friendly by beginning demolition work and required environmental abatements with grant funding.

The City hired Spicer Group to assist with the planning, design, environmental and project management services related to removing the remaining buildings from the site. This included the demolition of hundreds of thousands of square feet of buildings that ranged in size from a 400-square-foot incinerator building to a 57,000-square-foot cottage housing, buried steam piping tunnels, asbestos, underground fuel tanks, electrical transformers, and radioactive material from an old dental lab. Everything on the site that could be an impediment to future development was removed.

The City of Mt. Pleasant was left with a clean, developable site that will add an additional land base to the City and give developers an opportunity to build without the prohibitive cost of demolition and abatement. Spicer also provided a GIS map of everything else left on the site to the City, which was incorporated into their GIS system.