New life at Wayne-Dalton?

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STERLING - The city's decaying riverfront could get a boost from local developers interested in converting three acres of manufacturing space into service and professional businesses.

Jim Gabler, CEO and principal owner of VeriFacts in Sterling, is buying the former Wayne-Dalton building. He paid an undisclosed price for the 500,000-square-foot warehouse, empty since the garage-door builder left three years ago.

Gabler, together with his wife and daughter, hopes to retool the former manufacturing building on the 300 block of Third Street to suit a mix of high-tech document storage and information technology businesses, and include retail and professional office space.

The new venture could bring in anywhere from 300 to 500 new jobs, Gabler estimated.

The family envisions a mixed-use facility called Sterling Centers to be developed in five phases, starting with document and commercial storage, including boats, RVs and cars.

The timeline for phases two through five depends on such factors as government support at the federal, state and local levels, and business and market research, Gabler said.

The building falls within the Rock River TIF District, a three-mile sliver of land that roughly follows property lines along the Union Pacific Rail Road between Avenue C and Galt.

The tax increment financing zone was drafted to encourage investment along the stretch of blighted riverfront, and infrastructural improvements to the building would be eligible for tax concessions and rebates, said Scott Shumard, Sterling's city manager.

The Wayne-Dalton building, a relic of the Rust Belt, offers a dingy reminder of the economic devastation suffered in the Twin Cities nearly a decade ago, when a handful of once-towering riverfront companies toppled and thousands lost their jobs.

After years of steady decline, Northwestern Steel and Wire, Parrish-Alford, Reliant Fastener and Wayne-Dalton all shut their doors for good within five years of each other.

Before the mass manufacturing emigration, the segment accounted for about 1-in-3 area jobs. By the end of 2005, about 2,500 Sauk Valley residents were at least temporarily jobless.

The Gabler family business, VeriFacts, which does skip-tracing for the credit/collections industry, is in a downtown building reworked from the ashes of another defunct institution - Klein's department store.

Owing to increased patronage from credit giants like Discover, Sallie Mae and U.S. Bank, VeriFacts has doubled its work force over the past few years and uses only about half of Klein's space.