| Articles and Books |
| Case Studies |
| EPA Dialogs & Discussions |
| News |
| Press Releases |
| Standard Forms |
| White Papers |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||
 |
| Brownfields Weekly |
|
September 6, 2001 IN THIS ISSUE:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you'd like to announce your latest brownfields industry news, write to the editors: If you enjoy Brownfields Weekly, send a freind or colleague here. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Home of Voting Rights March Gets Community Involved in Brownfields The historic starting point of Martin Luther King’s Voting Rights March to Montgomery in 1965, the proud and picturesque city of Selma, Alabama, has suffered from steady economic decline over the last 30 years. This decline brought with it a major increase in blight. Worse, the closure and abandonment of several large manufacturing plants hit the city’s poorer residents hard. With a city population of 48,137, more than half of Selma residents live within the low-to-moderate income range, with unemployment standing at 10 percent. So the Selma Advisory Board, a community-based group of civic leaders, took action. To bring new economic development and jobs to the city -- and to bring back community-wide civic pride -- it needed to remediate three prominent sites: The 50-acre All-Lock Plant, the Waterfront District on the banks of the Alabama River, and the half-acre Selma East area pond. Toward that goal, the city applied for and received a $200,000 Brownfields Assessment Pilot last April. The initial Pilot phases will fund the completion of environmental audits and begin Phase I and II site assessments of the properties. The city is encouraging the whole community to get involved in the Pilot by setting up 11 task teams. A key task team of the Pilot involves the city’s youth in related volunteer projects. In addition to emphasizing community volunteerism, Selma’s task teams specializing in real estate, economic development, greenspace, industry, legal affairs and web site development. With broad community participation, Selma's brownfields initiative will add to the city's rich cultural legacy, while bringing a more promising economic future to city residents. Visit the City of Selma online:
Landfill Loses Landmark Status Due to Superfund History WASHINGTON, DC - (ENS) The Interior Department has shelved plans to designate a California landfill as a historic landmark, after learning that the dump is a former Superfund site. The Fresno Sanitary Landfill, the nation’s oldest, was one of 15 sites across the nation included on a list released by the Department of the Interior August 27. The landfill opened in 1937 and closed in 1987. In 1989, the dump was added to the federal Superfund list, due to the pollutants leaking from the unlined landfill into groundwater. The site has since been cleaned and capped at a cost of almost $38 million, and the city of Fresno plans to place a sports complex and a park on the former dump and surrounding land. The Department of the Interior said it was unaware of the landfill’s former status, and would withdraw the site’s inclusion on the historic landmark list while it reviewed its suitability. The National Park Service, which nominated the Fresno landfill to the list, said the site still warrants landmark status due to its importance in the nation’s history of civil engineering. The landfill is the oldest true sanitary landfill in the nation, and the oldest compartmentalized municipal landfill in the western U.S., holding the service record for more than 50 years of continuous operation. It was the first landfill to have employed the trench method of disposal and the first to compact refuse to increase storage capacity. Techniques used at the Fresno site were later adopted by the builders of all modern sanitary landfills. Troubled Mining Company Agrees to Pay What It Can for Cleanup BOISE, ID - The U.S. Department of Justice announced that the Hecla Mining Company has reached an agreement in principle with the US, on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency, the US Department of Agriculture-Forest service, and the Department of the Interior, to settle currently unresolved claims against the Company for cleanup costs associated with mine waste contamination in the Coeur d'Alene Basin and two other sites in Idaho. While the agreement in principle is not a final nor binding agreement, it contains specific terms that the United States and Hecla intend to include in a settlement document that they will immediately begin negotiating. The agreement in principle calls for Hecla to make, at a minimum, fixed annual payments of $5 million for the first two years; $6 million for next eight years; and $4 million for the next 20 years. The agreement in principle also calls for Helcla to provide a guarantee of the fixed payments for the first eight years and to make additional, variable payments over thirty years, in amounts tied to the Company's financial performance. The total amount paid by Hecla, expected to be in excess of $138 million and potentially much more, will be allocated by government agencies to undertake cleanup or restoration activities at the Bunker Hill Superfund site and the surrounding Coeur d'Alene basin, as well as at the Company's Stibnite and Grouse Creek mines in central Idaho. "The bottom line of this agreement is far short of what the actual cleanup costs will be," said Chuck Findley, EPA's acting regional administrator. "But due to metals markets and Hecla's current financial condition, we're faced with the reality of obtaining what we can in a way that enables Hecla to remain viable and producing a cleanup resource stream for the future. Our goal is to protect human health and the environment and we believe this agreement is a step in that direction." John Cruden, Acting U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division, stated "The proposed settlement terms are the best outcome for the public, given the realistic limits on what Hecla can afford." Mr. Cruden credited Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne and Department of Environmental Quality Director Steve Allred for helping facilitate the proposed deal. "State officials played a key role in bringing the parties together," Cruden said. The agreement in principle must still be incorporated into a proposed consent decree, which the parties will release for public review before the final settlement can be approved by a federal judge later this fall.
EPA Removes Oroville, CA Site from Superfund List SAN FRANCISCO, CA - With the cleanup complete, the EPA removed the Western Pacific Railroad Site in southern Oroville, California from the national listing of federal Superfund sites. While this is only the fifth Superfund site deleted in California, 35 sites have construction completed and another 38 sites have construction underway. There are currently 95 Superfund sites in California overall. "Our work is done here," said Keith Takata, director of the EPA's Superfund program in San Francisco. "Just 10 years after targeting this site for federal cleanup, we can say that the groundwater and soil no longer pose a threat to workers or the surrounding community." The EPA named the 90-acre Western Pacific Site as a federal Superfund site in 1990. From 1920 through 1982, Western Pacific used the western portion of the property to fuel, repair and maintain rail cars, which resulted in soil and groundwater at the site becoming contaminated with waste solvents, oils, grease and heavy metals. Under separate orders from the state and US EPA, the site's current owner, Union Pacific Railroad Co., removed contaminated soils from the property in 1989 and again in 1998. The EPA sampled and monitored groundwater for a decade before determining earlier this year that an on-site pump and treatment system had cleaned up contamination to federal cleanup levels. The site has been zoned only for industrial use in the future, and the EPA will conduct a review of the site every five years to ensure the property remains free of contamination. The EPA continues to work on another Oroville Superfund cleanup, Koppers Industries, Inc.
NEA to Award up to $1.25M Total In New Public Works Grants As part of its effort to invest in projects that promote and use design to make communities across the nation more livable, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will make a limited number of grants for design competitions to stimulate excellence in public design. This initiative is intended to bring institutions from across the country together with the best design talent, to raise the expectations and aspirations for public work, and to increase popular awareness of the importance of design in daily life. This Challenge America leadership initiative has a different emphasis each year. This year, the focus is the design of schools, with funding of up to ten projects at $75,000 each. Ten additional design competitions for projects with the potential for significant impact on the public realm -- especially those for institutional buildings, nonprofit housing, and public space -- will receive up to $50,000 each. The Endowment will also consider competitions for projects in areas of design that include: architecture, urban planning, industrial design and landscape architecture. Interdisciplinary design teams are encouraged. Projects may include, but are not limited to, competitions for schools, museums, performing arts spaces, municipal buildings, parks, waterfronts, bridges, highway rights-of-way, public housing, emergency service vehicles, innovative building technologies, transportation facilities, or large-scale master plans. Projects should be of a scope and scale that are of national significance and that offer possible approaches for other American communities. The letter-of-interest deadline is January 11, 2002. For more information on applying for an NEA New Public Works Grant, please visit: |