Studer Community Institute

Brownsville Middle back on the agenda

March 12, 2015
/ Shannon Nickinson
/ education

UPDATED AT 9 P.M. — The sale of Brownsville Middle School to GSI Brokerage will go to the Escambia School Board on March 17, but Superintendent Malcolm Thomas says he will recommend that the Board reject the sale. The proposal had been pulled from the agenda earlier, but Thomas said he placed the proposal to sell the property to GSI for $475,000 back on the agenda for the March 17 meeting. The sales proposal first came to the board in January, but action on it was delayed at that time. GSI Brokerage is the financial arm of GSI Recycling, the company that owns a scrap yard across Hollywood Avenue from the middle school — and Oakcrest Elementary School. GSI’s lawyer, Robert Beasley, said in an email Thursday evening the proposal was back on the agenda for this coming Tuesday's meeting. Thomas said that from the time the offer first came to his attention, he was clear that he did not want to see the scrap yard expand its operation across Hollywood Avenue near Oakcrest, which has some 700 students. The proposal Thomas is recommending be rejected requires that the property be split into two parcels. One parcel would include Oakcrest Elementary School and would remain zoned R-4 (multi-family). The other, which includes Brownsville Middle, would be rezoned C-1, (retail commercial) before the title was transferred to GSI. The proposal stipulates that that as long as Oakcrest Elementary is a open as a public school, GSI would not use the property for a junkyard salvage yard or waste tire processing facility “or similar use.” Thursday evening Thomas said he "had concerns that (the sale) would not be in the best interests of the students and the school community. "The School Board will get a chance to weigh in on that Tuesday night." Beasley said GSI’s owners wanted the property “to insulate their footprint in the area so they didn’t have another use come in that was inconsistent with their use.” Zoning change would be needed The school has been vacant since 2007. Two previous offers to buy the property over the years — both to church groups — fell apart. Changing the zoning on the middle school parcel is no small thing. The change from R-4 residential, whose highest use is 18-units per acre, to C-1, a commercial zoning with broad uses, would not be a small one. The Planning Board would have to approve such a change, as would the Board of County Commissioners. Kathleen Dough-Castro, spokeswoman for Escambia County, said the county planning department had no request to look into changing the zoning for the Brownsville school property yet. In 2009, the Rev. LuTimothy May and his congregation at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church made two offers to buy the building — one in July for $1,462,500, and one December for $1,002,000. That deal fell apart in acrimony. In 2014, the Rev. Paul Porterfield of Body of Christ Ministries Inc. offered $450,000 to buy the property. That deal was scuttled when Porterfield could not complete the financing. Vandals have damaged the school building often over the years, including once before the district would have signed off on the Porterfield sale. Before the GSI offer, the district was going to tear down the buildings and sell the property alone. It would have cost $175,000 to demolish the building. GSI-Scrap Inc. ties The Crosby-Rawls family — which owns GSI — also owns Scrap, Inc., a metal recycling facility just behind the scrapyard. The Scrap Inc. facility has drawn complaints from neighbors about the noise and truck traffic it generates. Pensacola lawyer Bob Kerrigan represents a group of residents who live near the car-crushing facility who are suing Scrap Inc., saying the facility’s presence has diminished their property values. Beasley says the GSI scrap yard deals in the “peddler market” of recycling — the place, for example, you sell a junker car to. There someone removes the seats, the engine, and other parts, and cuts the frame apart with a blowtorch. That scrap in turn is sold to a tertiary processor like Scrap Inc. The Scrap Inc. facility processes things such as car and steel that would be used in shipbuilding and the like for resale to steel mills for use as base material in their smelters. Beasley says GSI intention in buying the property was not expand the scrap yard and agreed to that language in the sales agreement. They planned to use it for office space, and for a staging area for trucks coming to the scrap yard. “According to the School Board, we can’t be the buyer,” Beasley said. “Instead they’ve decided the county needs to continue to maintain this property that is a big, giant albatross that needs to be demolished in a part of town that isn’t doing that well.”

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Brownsville Middle back on the agenda

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