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Athenex puts a rush on its site plan

OBSERVER File Photo: Ground breaking on the Athenex location has been delayed until the first of the year. However, activity continues at the location to prepare for the ground breaking.

The proposed Athenex plant’s site plan is moving forward and now the town of Dunkirk will need a consultant to help look over the plans.

“We need somebody to at least say they’re going to be on board to look at this stuff (site plans) and say if everything’s here or if there’s any missing stuff, they’ll tell us what else we need. And they have to understand that the developer’s going to pay for this consultant; it’s not going to come out of the town money at all. So, we have to have them give us an estimate of roughly what it’s going to cost,” Supervisor Richard Purol said during a recent special meeting.

Inspections are another reason the town needs a consultant for the project.

“They’ve changed things, too. Where Fort Schuyler was going to do all the inspections, now we’re going to be responsible for all the New York State Code inspections. That’s more than you can ask Sheridan’s code guy to do,” Purol added.

Dunkirk’s Code Enforcement Officer Ryan Mourer has been excused from working on the project due to a conflict of interest. Mourer is one of the owners of the land off Lake Shore Drive East slated for the cancer drug manufacturing plant.

Purol said he has the names of a couple engineering firms, but another conflict of interest prevents the town from using it’s go-to engineer.

“Normally, under other circumstances, we would have asked Clark Patterson Lee to do it; we’ve asked them to do everything else (water district engineering) for us. Unfortunately, Clark Patterson Lee is also the design engineer for the project. They’re doing the site plan, so they can’t do this (site plan review),” he said.

The town hopes to have request for proposals by the end of the week. The town board will meet again today at 6:30 p.m. in the town hall. The next meeting with Athenex is slated for Wednesday.

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