The Birmingham City Council this week approved a plan to re-zone the home of the city’s first orphanage, the Gateway campus near the airport, allowing it to be sold for a corporate headquarters.

Gateway, the oldest continuous social service agency in Birmingham, plans to sell its campus near the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport to Ambipar, the world’s largest environmental management company.

On Feb. 28, the council approved re-zoning from single family residential to qualified light industrial district, which will allow for the Gateway campus, at 5201 Messer Airport Highway, to become a corporate office for Ambipar.

“Gateway’s historic residential campus began as Birmingham’s original orphanage and first social services agency: The Mercy House,” Gateway’s non-profit IRS form says.

Gateway provides family counseling, foster care and other services. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union founded Mercy Home in 1891 to provide services for women and children. Mercy Home was a founding member of the Community Chest, which later became United Way of Central Alabama.

The agency changed its name to Gateway in 1968. The airport campus, known as the Susanna Campus, formerly offered residential treatment and housing to youth age 12 to 18 with severe emotional and behavioral issues.

Shannon S. Riley, U.S. CEO of Ambipar, said she founded One Step Environmental in 1999 and moved the company’s office to Woodlawn in 2008.

She sold One Step, headquartered at 4800 Division Avenue, to Ambipar in 2020 and it will maintain its office in Woodlawn. Riley said she was named CEO of U.S. operations for Ambipar in 2022 and had been looking for a corporate office when she became intrigued by the Gateway campus, which has convenient access to interstate highways and the airport.

“It’s a beautiful property, a great campus feel, and we want to maintain that,” Riley told the City Council. “I am very much in love with historical architecture. We will definitely be taking care of that historic nature there and celebrating that.”

The Gateway campus, with expansive, multi-story brick buildings visible at the Airport Highway exit off Interstate 20/59, is known for its quaint colonial village appearance.

“I’m happy to see the preservation of that site,” said Council member Valerie Abbott. “Those buildings are wonderful.”

The plan for the corporate office calls for up to 50 employees, Riley said. Her sale of One Step was one of 14 U.S. business acquisitions by Ambipar, she said.

“We have 900 employees in the U.S.,” she said. “We will be handling the management of all our U.S. operations” from the campus on Airport Highway. That includes accounting, payroll and corporate management, she said.

Riley said the company currently has a 40-member crew working on a Keystone pipeline oil leak in Ohio. “We never know what part of the country our guys are going to be going to,” she said.

Gateway no longer needs the campus, said a spokesperson for the agency who did not identify himself. “They no longer are running that type of facility and they no longer have a need, as far as their mission, they don’t have a need for that property anymore,” he said. “They would like to convert that to funds that they can use to further their mission.”

Riley said one of her lead managers, who she did not name, is a graduate of the Gateway program and lived on that campus as a youth.

“Hard work and field knowledge are what gets you promoted up through our industry,” she said.

Email reporter Greg Garrison: [email protected]

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