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The 115-year-old grain warehouse at the waterfront end of Caledonia Street, known locally as the “Moore Clark building,” has been a disintegrating eyesore for decades.

Ron Halterman, chief finan-cial officer and controller of Triton America, says that’s about to change.

Triton, which owns Pioneer Point Marina to the south of the historic building, bought the Moore-Clark building and the three-acre parcel it sits on from La Conner Associates two years ago.

At the time, the company was pulling the property out of foreclosure for La Conner Associates principal Vaughn Jolley, who had been trying for 15 years to develop the land. Triton agreed to lease the property back to Jolley for two years to give him another shot at bringing it back to life.

But again, the economy didn’t pick up enough for Jolley to launch his development plans, and his two-year lease expired at the end of March.

Now Triton has a huge mess on its hands. “We’re in the process of cleaning the building up,” Halterman said. “We have people in there right now trying to get the rats under control.”

For years Jolley had subleas-ed the property to Alpac Com-ponents, a manufacturer of walls for buildings. Alpac left last May after the town issued a third stop-work order for failing to haul its trash off the property. Town Administrator John Doyle said the company had been warned repeatedly for months to clean up its mess before the town was forced to shut it down.

Now Triton expects to spend $80,000 to clean up the garbage — the worst of it is inside the 15,000-square-foot Moore Clark building. Halterman said Alpac filled the building with things like scrap gypsum board 10 feet high in some places and even stored refuse up in the lofts. “They let them go for years just packing it in there, instead of dumping it like they were supposed to,” he said.

But before Triton takes out the trash, the company wants to make sure digging into the piles won’t spark a massive rat migration through town. “Big trucks won’t start moving in there until we make sure we’re not causing a calamity with wharf rats,” he said.

So far, Halterman said, it looks like the rodent colony is not as large as first imagined. Within the next month, once the threat of a rat invasion is over, residents along Caledonia Street can expect to see a constant parade of semi trucks hauling refuse out of the Moore Clark building eight hours per day for a week.

With the garbage gone, Triton will be able to launch its own development plans.

Back in 2012, Triton paid $2.34 million for the property, paid up three years in back taxes and about $80,000 in excise taxes when it purchased the old Moore Clark land.

Halterman said that the com-pany wants to save the big blue Moore Clark building for its historical significance. He estimates that it will cost $1.5 million to restore it. The old “refrigerator building” on the site will also be saved, he said.

From there, the company has several ideas on what to do at the property, and none of them involve manufacturing. Presently one idea is to put Triton’s new aerospace and marine engineering division in there, which is a high-skilled product design operation.

Triton has a reputation for being a good neighbor in La Conner. The company used to operate its Bayview Industries windmill mold operation out of the La Conner Pier property on Caledonia Street before the Upper Skagit Tribe bought it. Residents will remember the huge molds being wheeled through town and loaded on semi trucks near the roundabout. Triton always gave residents plenty of notice on mold moving days and did its best to prevent traffic snarls.

So far, town officials like Triton’s vision for the Moore Clark property, “I think they have a real good potential,” said La Conner Town Administrator John Doyle.

The company is also in favor of the town’s boardwalk being extended across its waterfront. Halterman said that later, Triton might even find a way to help attract more tourist traffic to the south end of First Street, perhaps with a specialty pub or some other draw.

But first “we’ll get this thing cleaned up,” he said.