Former ATI plant in West Leechburg looked at for new uses

The owners of a defunct steel mill in West Leechburg are hoping to move forward with reusing the property.

Though West Leechburg Holdings LLC purchased the former ATI plant on Mill Bridge Road last year, it only got access to the property this summer.

Matt Songer, manager of Surplus Asset Holdings, the parent company of West Leechburg Holdings, said the company was granted access to the building less than two months ago.

ATI was storing parts there and recently removed them from the property, Songer said. He said Surplus has been contacted by people looking at the building for manufacturing purposes.

“Numerous people have contacted us about uses (for the building). Big buildings with a lot of power have a lot of uses,” Songer said. “We haven’t been able to move forward with much until very recently.”

Now that the company has access to the property, he said, the building can be more closely assessed to see which parts are salvageable and if there’s anything that needs to be torn down.

The former ATI plant has been closed since 2006, when ATI announced it would phase out the site to save money. The site was primarily a finishing mill for steel coils delivered from ATI’s Brackenridge Works in Harrison.

Despite the plant’s employment slowly decreasing since the 1970s, its closing was a big hit to the budgets of West Leechburg and Leechburg Area school District. According to a previous report by TribLive, the borough and Westmoreland County collected almost $13,000 last year in property taxes from the site. The school district collected almost $53,000.

As for wage taxes, the school district and borough collected a combined total of almost $26,600 between October 2004 and September 2005.

The plant was built in the 1960s and employed almost 2,000 people in the 1970s. There were fewer than 243 employees at the plant in April 2005.

A recent study looking at properties in a number of Westmoreland County communities identified the former steel plant as being in poor shape and possibly a candidate for inclusion in the state-run Industrial Sites Reuse Program, administered the state Department of Community and Economic Development. The program could provide grant money to help prepare the property for reuse.