041103 Federal Beef Plans Fire Sale

Rapid City, IO - Prospective buyers from Canada and across the United States are expected to turn out for the big fire sale at the burned out Federal Beef Processors Inc. plant in Rapid City, according to auctioneer Martin Jurisch.

The auction begins at 9:30 a.m. at the packing plant site just north of the Executive Golf Course. The sale is expected to last much of the day.

Crews have been busy in recent weeks lining up sale items and auction lots. Although a number of pieces of equipment set for the auction block are specifically built for the meatpacking industry - hydraulic tongue clippers, for example - Jurisch said there will be a lot of cattle pens, gates, doors and general ranch equipment for sale as well.

The plant's owner, GFI King's Deluxe Foods of Minneapolis, is selling off all the packing plant equipment as it prepares for closing on the sale of the real estate beneath the plant.

The land's buyers, local businessmen Mike Tennyson and Pat Tlustos, are putting together plans for office commercial and residential uses for the 20-acre site. Whatever they build, the site will no longer be a meatpacking plant.

That role ended suddenly in January 2002, when a spectacular fire ripped though the plant. It put 400 people out of work and closed the longtime packing plant forever.

There has been little cleanup at the site since the fire. The plant's owner GFI King's Deluxe Foods of Minneapolis faces more than 900 municipal citations for maintaining a public nuisance. The city also has a civil suit pending to force GFI to clean up the mess.

The criminal case is pending in Pennington County Magistrate Court. Both sides wrapped up late last week, and Magistrate Judge Shawn Pahlke is reviewing the evidence.

Meanwhile, Jurisch and Harry Davis & Co., a Pittsburgh auction firm that specializes in industrial food processing equipment, were hired by Federal Beef parent company, GFI King's Deluxe Foods of Minneapolis, to sell off all of the fixtures and equipment not destroyed in the January 2002 fire.

Despite the spectacular blaze, Jurisch said, much of the packing plant was not damaged by the fire. The kill floor, the boning room, the rendering plant and various outbuildings and maintenance shops remain intact.

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