Former Westinghouse property on course to be purchased by Bloomington Transit for new operations center

The former ABB Inc. property on the northeast corner of Curry Pike and Profile Parkway on the western outskirts of Bloomington—previously owned by Westinghouse—is on a path to be purchased by Bloomington Transit (BT) for use as a new operations center. The current owner is BB Profile, LLC, which acquired the land from ABB, Inc. in 2021 for $2.15 million.

At a special meeting held on Tuesday morning (Dec. 30), BT’s board approved an option to purchase the land for a price that will be determined after an additional appraisal for the property is done. Bloomington Transit has 180 days to complete the transaction.

Not affected or involved in the new operations facility is BT’s downtown bus transit center, at 3rd and Walnut streets.

The new operations center will replace the facility at Grimes Lane, which includes an administration building owned by BT, and real estate owned by Indiana University, which also houses its bus fleet at Grimes Lane, alongside BT buses.

The new location, with its roughly 19 acres, would be enough to house the Indiana University campus bus fleet as well as BT buses, according to BT general manager John Connell. IU does not currently have plans to transfer its buses to BT’s new site, according to Connell. However, BT’s current strategic plan calls for increased integration with the IU campus bus system.

The real estate purchase has been several months in the works, and the board has held more than one executive session on the topic. Real estate transactions are one of the topics on which a governing agency can hold meetings closed to the public under Indiana’s Open Door Law.

BT has been paying the owner $3,334 per month since mid-2025 for a right of first refusal for the property—which works out to $20,000. That six-month period was set to expire at the end of the year.

In local shorthand, Westinghouse is closely associated with PCB contamination in Monroe County tied to industrial activity in the 1950s through the 1970s. The property at Profile Parkway and Curry Pike has a restrictive environmental easement on it that, among other things, prohibits any residential use of the property.

In August, there emerged a potential Westinghouse connection to the property that is now eyed by BT—at a point when the specific location of the real estate had not yet been publicly disclosed. At the board’s August meeting, BT general manager John Connell told the board that in one of the 10 borings done on the property, PCBs were found in amounts that exceed an allowable threshold. That led to more borings to determine the extent of the contamination.

At Tuesday morning’s meeting, Connell responded to a B Square question about the PCB contamination by saying that additional borings were taken around the “hot spot” to define the extent of the contamination and to estimate a worst-case cleanup cost. That estimate, Connell said, was about $200,000 if excavation and removal were required.

Connell said that depending on the final site design, it might be possible to leave the contaminated area undisturbed—which would make the effective cleanup cost zero. He added that Bloomington Transit now knows the exact location and magnitude of the contamination, and that information will be factored into the project’s design and costs.

Bloomington Transit is looking to move its operations from the Grimes Lane location, because it doesn’t have enough space there to house its expanding fleet, to handle increased frequencies and a planned new Green Line crosstown east-west express route. The fleet will also soon include three longer, articulated buses to handle the volume of passengers on some of its routes.

Also part of the impetus to get more space is BT’s desire to build climate-controlled storage for its all-electric new buses. Climate controlled storage helps with battery performance. It’s part of a push to convert BT’s entire fleet to all-electric vehicles. There isn’t room on its current footprint at Grimes Lane to construct a climate controlled facility that would be outside the FEMA floodway.

While there’s $10 million in BT’s budget to cover land acquisition costs, building the new facility will require BT to piece together some federal funding. As of last year, the total estimated cost for BT’s new facility was $54.4 million, which included the $10 million for land acquisition, and $600,000 for architectural and engineering work. BT was hoping to get $35 million from the FTA (Federal Transit Authority), through Section 5339(b) of Title 49 of the United States Code. But that initial application did not come through.

To help pay for the project, BT is now looking at about $13.6 million of Section 5307 funding that it has been awarded but is still uncommitted.

At Tuesday’s special meeting, Connell said he thinks that a reapplication for the Section 5339(b) funding will now have a better chance of success when it’s evaluated by the Federal Transit Administration, because a land deal will be in place, as well as conceptual drawings tied to a specific site.

BT’s design-build firm for the project is GM Development. The project is being pursued under a part of Indiana state code on public-private partnerships that is covered under state law, called a BOT (build operate transfer) process.

Connell also said on Tuesday it might be necessary to phase the operations center project, if funding for the whole project is not available to complete the work all in one step.