Stella desires to be a good corporate citizen

Vermont Business Magazine, Aug 01, 1995 by Kelley, Kevin J

A new management team at Stella Foods' Hinesburg plant is winning plaudits from town residents for its response to long-standing community concerns regarding pollution at the giant cheese-making facility.

Local leaders say relations between the town and its biggest employer have vastly improved in the two years since Stella was sold to a group of investors affiliated with Texas billionaire Robert Bass. The plant's previous owners and operators were much less cooperative in their dealings with the town, according to Hinesburg Select Board chairman Lynn Gardner.

C Dean Metropoulos served as chief executive of Stella Foods, parent to the Hinesburg factory, until the company was sold to Bass' group in August 1993 for $375 million. The Hinesburg plant, which used to be known as the International Cheese Company, was headed for a time by Metropoulos' brother, Evan. Both the Metropoulos brothers are now out of the picture locally, with Sid Kittelson having taken over as the Hinesburg plant manager last February.

"It was a very profit-oriented operation," Selectman Gardner said of the factory during the time it was controlled by the Metropoulos brothers. "Making money by making cheese was all they ever looked at. The town usually dealt with them only through attorneys."

The friendlier face of the Hinesburg facility was on display July 4 when it held its first-ever open house. Public response to the invitation to tour the plant and talk with managers was "overwhelming," Gardner said. "The Metropoulos brothers never let anyone into the plant to see what was going on," he said.

Kittelson, who came to Vermont from a Stella facility in Wisconsin, declined to discuss the Metropoulos' tenure, other than to say that their relations with Hinesburg had been "almost adversarial." Kittelson described the current state of affairs between the town and the plant as "very good," adding, "We want to be a good, strong member of the community."

Specialty Foods, the Illinois-based conglomerate that now includes Stella, has no intention of pulling the factory out of Hinesburg, Kittelson assured. He pointed to a new $1.2 million wastewater treatment system as proof of the company's commitment to the Chittenden County community.

"We're not going to walk away from that anytime soon," Kittelson said, further noting that the Hinesburg plant is Stella's only manufacturing and distribution facility in the Northeast.

The cheese-making operation is an important component of Vermont's overall economy. The Hinesburg factory processes about one-fifth of the milk produced in the state on a daily basis, according to the Agriculture Department.

With 210 workers, the plant is by far the largest source of jobs in Hinesburg. Its property tax payments are also important to the town, though not nearly to the extent that IBM underpins the budget of Essex Junction. The cheese factory pays Hinesburg about $100,000 a year in taxes, an amount which ranks it only third or fourth on the town's rolls, according to Gardner. Overall, Hinesburg collects nearly $5 million in annual property taxes.

Local residents are especially pleased by the steps taken to mitigate the odor that has periodically been emitted by the plant for the past 25 years.

The new wastewater treatment system is credited with making a big difference, though Hinesburg officials are not prepared to go quite as far as Kittelson, who said of the stench, "We think we've got it solved."

Town leaders caution that more time must pass before the problem can be said to have been eliminated. But "we're very satisfied to this point," remarked Gardner. "The initial results are extremely encouraging."

Home owners in close proximity to the factory, which is situated near the village center, have long complained of foul odors. The stink was actually not the fault solely of the cheese plant, Gardner said, but was sometimes caused by the town's own deficient treatment system. That facility, too, has been upgraded.

Stella recently installed a larger and better-designed clarifier, which separates solids from the discharge water sent by the plant to the town's treatment system. In addition to making the clarifying process more effective, Stella has begun aerating the lagoons that hold wastewater in order to prevent the stagnation that causes the odors.

The improvements in both the factory and town systems came partly in response to fines that the US Environmental Protection Agency levied about a year ago against Stella and the town of Hinesburg. The company was fined $100,000 and the town $10,000 for violating EPA standards on the amount of phosphorous that could be discharged into the LaPlatte River. Hinesburg was also temporarily barred from approving new hookups to the town's water system.

Redesigning the factory's treatment system and upgrading the municipal facility were steps recommended in an engineering study co-sponsored by Hinesburg and Stella. The improvements in Hinesburg's system were financed through a federal grant.

Stella's cleanup initiative is said by Kittelson to reflect "an aggressive approach to renovating equipment and buildings" at the site. "There had been some definite inefficiencies" in the plant under its previous ownership, the new manager said. When the changes are completed, he predicted, "this will be a state-of-the-art facility."