Glenside Fresh Start, a grassroots information and awareness organization, has joined the conversation regarding the future of the 105-year-old, 32-acre SPS Technologies property in Jenkintown.
The site launched on April 5. Eight days later, a Change.org petition titled “PREVENT Rebuilding of SPS Technologies in Abington, PA” began making its way through social media groups in greater Glenside. Now with 377 signees and counting, the petition’s author—as well as Glenside Fresh Start’s founder—has been mostly anonymous.
Colby Keyser, a Glenside resident of 23 years (and a Jenkintown resident for five years prior), says she is the source of both information outlets, with help from roughly 41 additional residents and members of the organization. She says she sees the disaster as an opportunity to make the surrounding area a better place to live.
“When the fire happened, I wanted to know why we’d bother rebuilding something that was blatantly bad for our environment,” she said. “Now we have the opportunity to put something there that could help create a better community than we already are.”
Potential ideas for the 301 Highland Avenue location include a mixed-use with commercial and green space, a community center, a park, or “anything other than a factory for the people who live here,” Keyser said.
“I was never happy with the factory. They would off-gas through the summer and I’d wake up in the middle of the night with a chemical smell, we’d smell it outside, and I never did anything about it even though it really bothered me,” she said.
Keyser hears the counterarguments, among them a reliable, longstanding place of employment for local residents and a strong tax base to support the community. However, Keyser says, those contentions may not hold as much water as they once did.
“A lot of the residents I’ve spoken to aren’t aware that SPS only pays about $23,000 a year in property taxes,” she said. According to the petition, that amount accounts for “.02% of the township’s taxes, but they were exempt from mercantile taxes, so the township won’t raise taxes if they don’t rebuild.” From Glenside Fresh Start’s website:
It pays the school district only $145,863 in school taxes (approximately 0.07% of the school district’s budget). And most noteworthy, SPS pays zero dollars in business taxes. A state law, the Local Tax Enabling Act, exempts companies that manufacture goods – including SPS – from paying local business taxes.
For comparison, the neighboring property, an LA Fitness at 371 Highland Avenue, is five acres and is paying $17,000 in municipal taxes and $107,000 in school taxes per year, according to public tax records.
Because the factory has already laid off half its workforce and is expected to take 3-5 years to rebuild, supporting local employees, while a noble gesture, is a non-factor for Glenside Fresh Start. Also from the website:
Half of SPS’s employees were let go just a month after the fire with only 4 weeks severance. As a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway we know they can do better! We don’t need their factory HERE, put it where our neighborhood is safe and their employees are well taken care of and don’t have to wait 4 years for remediation and rebuild.
“Many seem to think that because it’s always been there, it should stay there. I want to support the SPS workers, but there’s a better way to do that,” Keyser said, noting that the facility has been bought out twice “so it’s not the same entity that it once was.”
“Precision [Castparts Corporation, which owns SPS] is one of the biggest polluters in the U.S.,” Keyser, who lost her husband to cancer in 2020, said. “Carcinogens are a serious concern. We have plenty of industrial parks around us. It’s a no-brainer to go elsewhere. We need more trees. It’s one of the main entrances to our township, and that property houses a watershed.”
From a February 27 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer:
The Abington facility was permitted to handle carcinogens linked to increased risks for cancer. In 2023, SPS had disposed of 177 tons of chemicals, according to the most recent results from the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory. That same year, SPS had to pay the EPA $109,000 for storing chemicals without a permit.
Heffner said that SPS standards had relaxed after it was acquired by Precision Castparts. The two-engine volunteer fire crew had been disbanded, he said, along with the morale-boosting company picnics and sports leagues. Jobs at the factory had also dwindled from 900 workers when Precision Castparts bought the firm to 471 at the time of the fire.
Keyser also pointed to a survey by the Greater Glenside Civic Association which shows “more respondents than not wanted something else built there besides the factory,” she said. Results below:
And then there are the lawsuits. The site mentions a class action from February 27 by the Philadelphia-based law firm Anapol Weiss, and another filed on behalf of four law firms in early March. The first lawsuit was filed by a Wyncote resident on February 20, three days after the fire began.
Glenside Fresh Start’s listserv caught the attention of SPS Technologies’ current CFO, Chris McBride.
“We got an email from him a couple weeks ago,” Keyser said. “He trolled us.”
“The new website is awesome!!! I particularly like the pictures up there from Bulgaria, the Indiana canal and Amsterdam. Keep up the good work!” McBride wrote in the email below.
In related news, Highland Avenue in the Jenkintown section of Abington Township, shut down since the fire, reopened today to traffic between Mt. Carmel Avenue and Wharton Road.
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