NOTE: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported the end date of the lease. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.
After weeks of speculation, Mayor Rickey Williams Jr. announced Tuesday night that Ameren Illinois has purchased the former Gaudio Budweiser distribution plant on Georgetown Road in Tilton to make it the home of its operations center for the Danville area.
Ameren has been leasing about 5,000 square feet of space in the city’s Public Works Building on East Voorhees Street, a building Ameren formerly owned for decades before selling it to the city in 2008.
Williams said Ameren has agreed to honor its lease through April 2022. After that, the city would be on tap for the utility bills, which Williams said would be about $80,000 per year.
The Tilton site was built in 2008 as the new home of the Earl Gaudio Budweiser distribution company, but the company filed for bankruptcy a few years later and was sold to the Anheuser-Busch distributor in Decatur. The building has sat mostly empty since then, although a fitness center operated in the back of the facility until recently, when it moved to a new building.
