FoodPort drops idea for methane gas plant

Responding to virulent community protests, the nonprofit developer of the internationally-acclaimed West Louisville FoodPort dropped plans Thursday for a methane plant powered by decomposing food waste.

Nature’s Methane, the company poised to build a $40 million composting facility at the FoodPort on five acres at 30th Street and Muhammad Ali Boulevard, is no longer part of the development, Seed Capital Kentucky project director Caroline Heine said.

Amid widespread community opposition from activists concerned about longtime industrial pollution in the West End, Nature’s Methane has also postponed a presentation to the Board of Zoning Adjustment Monday on plans for a second $40 million methane power plant at 17th and Maple streets to compost waste and return natural gas to the Heaven Hill distillery, Nature’s Methane CEO Steve Estes said.

The notion of importing any kind of waste into the West End — nevermind its use in a sealed composting facility to create environmentally sustainable power — has ignited fury among activists who invoked decades of Rubbertown’s legacy of negative effects on the health and safety of neighborhoods nearby.

“This is a community that has had too many things done to them for too long, instead of with them and for them,” Seed Capital Kentucky founder Stephen Reily said in an interview Wednesday.

That legacy, Reily added, “for a century has chosen to place toxic problems where disenfranchised people live ... It has created a very strong fear of more projects like that,” Reily said. “The fact that this is new and different started to look like the long history of poisonous projects that have been inflicted on them rather than a promising new future.”

“Given that we are a community project that is working to rebuild our whole community together,” he added, “we felt we had to listen to that fear and respond by tabling our plans for the digester.”

The $25 million FoodPort expects to break ground next spring on 24 acres in an 80,000 square feet building designed by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, the internationally renowned firm of architect Rem Koolhaas. Tenants will include Piazza Produce, a produce distribution company that is growing its business connecting local farmers to customers like Churchill Downs and restaurants. Another tenant negotiating for lease space is the The Weekly Juicery, a chain of juice outlets, Heine said.

Next is a two-acre demonstration farm on site, run by the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture. Local chefs and caterers looking for licensed commercial facilities can rent space in a “kitchen incubator” in the building, Heine said. In all, the FoodPort will employ 200 people, and create 275 construction jobs, according to Seed Capital’s revised plan filed Thursday with Louisville Metro Planning & Design Services.

Touted by Mayor Greg Fischer to Italian mayors during a recent trek to Milan, the FoodPort is envisioned as a civic project to revitalize the West End, address health issues and the scarcity of affordable healthy groceries in the neighborhood. As a result, the FoodPort has drawn international attention and was praised by the Prince of Wales during his recent Louisville visit to discuss global food justice and health issues.

“The city is deeply committed to this innovative development that has the power to transform how we grow, process, market and sell food,” Fischer said in a statement Wednesday. The FoodPort, he added, “is one of the most dynamic projects in our city’s recent history. It has the potential to become a national model and it’s being constructed in Russell, a neighborhood that will significantly benefit from the jobs and innovation it creates.”

Widespread concern about odor, even from 30 trucks ferrying food waste daily to a FoodPort biodigester methane plant, touched a nerve among West End neighbors, said Rev. Milton Seymore, executive director of the nonprofit Justice Resource Center.

“There has been an odor and a smell in that area for years. We fought for years against those chemical plants,” Seymore said. “I am for the FoodPort. I don’t have any problems if they remove the digester off of the table.”

In the FoodPort’s neighborhood of Russell, the median income stands at $14,457 annually. More than half of residents — 58 percent — dwell in households with incomes below federal poverty guidelines while the unemployment rate is 41 percent among adults ages 25 to 44, according to a 2014 study by the Network Center for Community Change.

Besides attracting locally owned businesses to provide services and workers for landscaping, security, and more for the FoodPort, the goal remains to attract a grocery, Heine said.

“We need to have a grocery that is interested in locating here,” she said, adding that search so far has netted no bites. “If we find one, we will build it.”

For its part, Nature’s Methane remains committed, Estes said, to its plans to build a second biodigester to compost byproducts of bourbon production on 8 acres near Heaven Hill. Seeking more dialogue with the community, Nature’s Methane has postponed, he said, a Monday zoning hearing to allow composting at that site south of Broadway, he added.

Jere Downs can be reached at (502) 582-4669, @JereDowns on Twitter and Jere Downs on Facebook.

FoodPort Community Council Meeting

Seed Capital Kentucky will present revised plans for the FoodPort Monday at the Shawnee Golf Course Clubhouse at 460 Northwestern Pkwy. at 6 p.m. Monday in a meeting hosted by Louisville Councilwoman Cheri Bryant Hamilton. For more information, call (502) 574-1105.