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The city of Morristown’s Roy Widener property is soon to move into a new chapter, and officials discussed its fate and future at a workshop.

Bought as a potential Public Works location in the late 2000s and used mostly as a storage and training location, the property was never utilized fully and the City has gone through steps to sell the property in two different sections for development.

City Administrator Andrew Ellard described environmental testing that has been taking place that will provide the proverbial clean-bill-of-health as the city begins the process of divesting property it no longer needs.

“East Tennessee Development District received an EPA grant for brownfields assessments, and we’ve been in partnership with them for the last several years as they have administered that grant,” he said. “Roy Widener site was one of those sites that they used that grant on. (After testing soils and other environmental concerns), they really didn’t find anything earth shattering, anything that you wouldn’t expect to find as a former trucking site.”

There was grant money left over the process and used the remainder to conduct even more testing.

“Let me emphasize that none of this has been city dollars doing this — this has all been through EPA brownfield assessment grants,” Ellard said.

The property has two sections, one that sits on an upper elevation near a neighborhood and the lower section that adjoins N. Liberty Hill road and is the site of the former Roy Widener trucking company.

The city is splitting the sections into two properties as there is current interest from parties in the upper section for use as residential development.

The lower section, after it receives documentation of extensive testing that shows future owners shouldn’t be left with a polluted mess, will be sold off to remain as commercial or potential industrial uses.

“That Brownfield voluntary agreement (that documents the testing) is the mechanism through which we get liability protection going forward, so if we sold the property and something down the road was found that we didn’t find (during the grant funded testing process), we’ve got a legal backing to protect us from anybody saying we didn’t disclose something about it.”

In the meantime, the city has issued a Request for Proposal to formally gauge interest in the upper section of the property.

The RFP will see developers submit proposals that will define project goals, scope and requirements for what they see as good use of the property.

A separate RFP will be issued for the lower section, once the testing is complete and certified and the city can document the status of the property with total transparency.