RACINE - It took the better part of a decade for lawn mowers to return to a south side business park vacated in 2001. But this time around, they're helping rebuild a dilapidated building - and it's surroundings - rather than being built within its walls.

The landscape where Jacobsen Manufacturing once made lawn-mowing equipment and Textron followed with turf-care products has seen a revitalization in both business and beauty.

Today the city has no Jacobsen or Textron. But at the site where they employed hundreds of people, Racine has another place where future industries could find a home: The Southside Industrial Park.

The 14-acre business park sits mainly on the grave site of the former Jacobsen Manufacturing, which later became Textron Golf, Turf & Specialty Products. Textron announced in December 2000 that it was closing its Racine factory, and on June 29, 2001, manufacturing ceased.

Textron's pullout cost Racine 275 jobs, 220 of them manufacturing based, and it left behind 480,000 square feet of dead, outdated manufacturing space.

About a year later, the city decided to create an industrial park on the site. Five years later, it's ready to open with a ribbon cutting next week.

City Development Director Brian O'Connell acknowledges the rehabilitation of the site took a long time. That was partly because a Milwaukee buyer stepped in before the city and made a deal with Textron. The city then had to wrest it from his hands.

"I would argue there has never been a moment of down time," O'Connell said. "But there are things that happen in sequence, and you can't jump the line."

After gaining site control, the city had to perform an environmental assessment on how to demolish the old buildings, deal with asbestos, and so on. Contracts had to be put to bid, buildings had to be razed, new utilities and a street were installed.

The site clean-up was challenging, O'Connell said. For example, the city thought it had all of its storm water and sanitary sewers separated. But on the Jacobsen site, it found a sanitary sewer which ran right into a storm sewer.

To explore what was underground, all available charts and maps had been scoured. The old, underground oil tanks had been removed.

"Then, we were doing final grading and a bulldozer comes and sheers off the top of a tank," O'Connell said. "I just couldn't believe it.

"But that's a brownfield."

Brownfield to green

The new industrial park lies immediately west of Modine Manufacturing Co. and about a block east of the Racine County Workforce Development Center. South to north, it lies between DeKoven Avenue and 18th Street.

The park cost roughly $4 million - about half of that from brownfield-redevelopment grants, O'Connell said.

It has a couple of interesting wrinkles.

"We wanted to go from a brownfield to as green as we could make it," O'Connell said.

The detention pond just north of 18th Street uses bioremediation; its bottom is lined with plants that will filter storm water before it goes to the storm sewers. O'Connell said he thinks that's a first for Racine.

Another innovation changes how industrial park land is usually sold. Instead of simply selling parcels, "Here, the main parcel will be under condo ownership," O'Connell explained.

"(Buyers) get their property and a share in a common parking lot." That makes more-efficient use of the land.

"And it's more ecologically sound because you're using less of the site in hard surface."

Here or elsewhere?

O'Connell said the city will likely offer two-acre chunks of land in Southside, but a company could take almost any amount. "We're probably looking at three industrial sites."

Naturally, the park will compete for business with other possible places that companies could go. Its advantages, O'Connell said, include a large nearby population of potential labor, available transit and industrial neighbors such as Modine and Kranz Inc.

The list price for land is $35,000 per acre. That's toward the low end of Racine County industrial parks, said Deputy Director Jenny Trick of the Racine County Economic Development Corp.

She cited some examples with these approximate prices: $27,500 per acre in Burlington Manufacturing and Office Park on Highway 83; $44,900 in Caledonia Business Park; $89,900 in Renaissance Business Park, Sturtevant; $100,000 in GrandView Business Park, Yorkville; and $125,000 in Mount Pleasant Commerce Center.

Trick is happy to have another business park in RCEDC's portfolio of places to show a business that's relocating or moving up to a new, larger site.

Southside doesn't have the proximity to Interstate 94 that other parks offer, but that won't be a drawback in every case, Trick said.

"For some companies, that is not a down-side for them, if they don't have to rely on the Interstate .. or they still believe an urban setting is important to them."

O'Connell described Southside's niche as small, growing companies that need a new site and their own building.

"Being in town, it will not compete for distribution centers or others that are heavy on trucking," he said.

And now, the marketing of Southside Industrial Park by RCEDC can begin in earnest, although O'Connell said there has been some interest already.

"Obviously," he said, "you can take it into higher gear when you have actual sites to show."