Waterfront Cleanup
Documents details levels of toxins
by Emily Weiner in Cascadia Weekly
When the Port of Bellingham prepares the land on the Georgia-Pacific site for redevelopment, how clean do you want the Port to leave the land? What level of land cleanup do you want the Port to pay for with your tax dollars?
The Bellingham Bay Foundation has submitted an initiative that Bellingham voters may see on the ballot in November, which seeks to let residents weigh in on those questions about cleanup of the land. (See sidebar for the initiative text and details about a June 8 public forum.)
Before focusing on land issues, a digression about water cleanup is necessary.
The BBF initiative seeks to allow residents to register their views on the question about cleanup of the Whatcom Waterway, which separates the two land masses of the GP site. There has been much public discussion about cleanup of the water. It’s been widely discussed that BBF favors dredging contaminated sediment out of Whatcom Waterway, depositing it in GP’s water treatment lagoon (“the ASB,” for Aerated Stabilization Basin), then covering it with impermeable material and topping that with soil to create a 30-acre waterfront park. The Port, which owns the GP site, prefers capping the contaminated sediments of Whatcom Waterway and dredging the ASB to create a marina partly encircled by public trails.
Public debate on cleanup of Whatcom Waterway will take place in a new framework this summer, when the state Department of Ecology releases the draft “RI/FS” for Whatcom Waterway. The document will consist of a “Remedial Investigation” that will define the nature and extent of the contamination and a “Feasibility Study” that will identify and evaluate a range of cleanup alternatives.
A draft RI/FS is prepared by the parties responsible for cleaning the site—in this case the Port of Bellingham—then reviewed and finalized by the Department of Ecology. At the end of public discussion of the draft RI/FS, Ecology will decide how the Port must clean up Whatcom Waterway.
Voters don’t decide how the mercury deposited by GP will be cleaned up, the Port doesn’t decide and the city doesn’t decide. Ecology decides. That’s why the BBF initiative asks the city to “use all reasonable means available to persuade the Department of Ecology and other stakeholders to approve a cleanup plan that permanently removes the maximum amount of contaminated sediments, including mercury, from the Whatcom Waterway.”
Lucy McInerney, of Ecology, who is in charge of the cleanup plans for both the Whatcom Waterway and the GP land, has said the draft RI/FS concludes that cleanup of Whatcom Waterway can proceed because there’s no danger that groundwater on the GP site will re-contaminate the bay.
Land cleanup
Ecology is more than two years away from issuing a draft RI/FS for the land component.
When GP owned the site, Ecology was working on an RI/FS that assumed the site would have only industrial activities, but Ecology changed course when notified the Port would buy the site and partner with the city for mixed-use development.
“It’s up to the community and the property owners to define land uses, so we can develop a cleanup that is protective under that land use,” McInerney explained.
Here’s the parts of the BBF initiative pertaining to decisions Ecology will make about land:
The BBF initiative directs the City to use all reasonable means to persuade Ecology and other stakeholders to approve the unrestricted cleanup standard for the GP mill site, if technically feasible. The measure also prohibits the City from advocating plans that clean the site to only an industrial standard. (The complete initiative text is included in a box on page 7).
Port of Bellingham Environmental Director Mike Stoner said the Port will perform a cleanup to the unrestricted standard under the state’s Model Toxics Control Act (MTCA), used for all properties not confined to industrial use. Ecology’s cleanup decisions are based on MTCA standards.
So is the BBF initiative unnecessary? Is there any reason for voters to ask the city to try to persuade Ecology to insist the Port clean the land beyond an industrial standard?
Performing the cleanup to the “unrestricted” MTCA standard doesn’t mean that all the land will be cleaned so thoroughly that its use would be unrestricted. When the Port says the land will be cleaned for mixed-use development, it doesn’t mean all uses will be possible in all areas. In particular, Stoner said cleaning some parts of the site to allow first-floor housing might be so expensive that developers would be unlikely to take on those costs.
“We’re trying to get to a situation where, from a MTCA perspective, housing could go anywhere, but we’re trying to be smart about where housing would be appropriate,” Stoner said.
The cleanup plan the Port has proposed Ecology adopt for the GP land would include severe use restrictions for six acres between Whatcom Waterway and Cornwall Avenue. That area was contaminated by mercury from GP’s chlor-alkali plant, which manufactured chlorine and sodium hydroxide (caustic) from 1965 until it was closed in 1999.
A Port internal document, dated May 15 of this year, lists the Port’s current remedial plan. The plan includes a combination of soil removal, in-place treatment and capping of mercury-contaminated soil; mercury vapor monitoring; a combination of focused groundwater treatment, control and long-term monitoring; and maintaining a cap at the Chem-Fix area.
The Chem-Fix area—about two acres just east of the log pond—is where GP in 1976 used the proprietary Chem-Fix process, which resembles concrete, to solidify mercury-contaminated wastewater sludge and sediment from the chlor-alkali plant. The solidified soils, averaging less than three feet thick, were covered with a plastic liner, half a foot of sand and about three inches of asphalt.
In September 2004, as part of its due diligence before purchasing the GP site and securing cleanup insurance, the Port had The Retec Group, an environmental consultant, characterize the cleanups expected to be required for land on different parts of the site. Retec’s document characterizes eight groupings of land and includes an eight-color map and a table estimating environmental compliance costs for each land group. (The Retec document is online at cascadiaweekly.com/cleanup.php)
Retec describes properties of concern that “contain types of concentrations of contaminants that are expected to limit future development uses.” Two areas, they say, “currently identified are located within the GP chlor-alkali plant area. These include the former ‘Chem-Fix’ disposal area, and the ‘caustic plume.’ Due to the presence of materials that Ecology considers listed hazardous wastes, penetration of the Chem-Fix area during development is likely to be effectively prohibited. In the caustic plume area, mercury vapor concentrations are elevated to the point that Ecology is expected to prohibit residential uses, depending on the type of remediation performed.”
Most of the GP site between Whatcom Waterway and Cornwall Avenue (excluding the narrow strip extending to the Cornwall Avenue Landfill and the Chem-Fix and chlor-alkali hot spots) is characterized as “low-level soil and impacted groundwater.” Retec wrote, “In these areas, non-industrial development will require placement of a soil or asphalt cap.”
Retec estimates the average incremental development costs for areas of the most intense contamination (designated Group 8) at $4.15 per square foot plus utility corridors and use restrictions, to comply with “Proposed Environmental Protection Standards.” Stoner explained that these estimates were based on Port assumptions about the amount of space that would be redeveloped as park, commercial and residential.
He said these estimates are the costs to maintain the protectiveness of the cleanup. For example, if a future building’s foundation would have to serve double duty as a seal for underground contamination—as does the foundation of the GP tissue warehouse—the extra cost for that double duty is included.
So what are the “Proposed Environmental Protection Standards” that would trigger these costs?
Two-phase remediation
“The Port plans to separate remediation activities into two phases,” Retec wrote. “The first phase of remediation will consist of those actions that are required to remediate site groundwater, or to comply with industrial cleanup levels.”
Retec uses the phrase “site cleanup” to mean getting the site to industrial cleanup levels.
The second phase Retec calls “environmental protection standards,” meaning “additional actions that are required if/when the property is converted to alternative (i.e. non-industrial) site uses.”
The Port wants Ecology to implement “environmental protection standards” as restrictive covenants during the initial cleanup action, rather than require the Port to clean the land to those standards.
To understand the Port’s intention vis a vis cleaning the GP site, it’s necessary to understand whether a statement is referring to “site cleanup” or to meeting “environmental protection standards.” It’s also crucial to understand which remediation the Port expects to do and which remediation the Port expects either the City or developers to do.
Who will pay?
So who will foot the bill for development to meet “environmental protection standards”?
Stoner said those costs will be borne at the time of future development, which could be decades away, and it’s not determined yet who will pay.
“It could be that the Port and a developer would share the costs in some allocation. It could be a developer would take on all the costs. It could be the Port and the city—there are a lot of possibilities,” Stoner said.
What will the cleanup insurance pay for?
Stoner said the insurance accommodates unrestricted land use. But when asked about whether insurance would pay for cleanup to make an area safe for first-floor housing, Stoner said that issue will be decided by both Ecology and the insurance company.
“When you get into a project that gets into cleanup activities and property development activities, it’s always a discussion of what is cleanup cost and what is property development cost,” he said
Leaders debate cleanup
Robyn du Pré, executive director of RE Sources, who is also on the Waterfront Advisory Group, began monitoring cleanup of GP contamination in 1998 when she was RE Source’s North Sound Bay Keeper. She thinks it would be helpful for WAG to look at the Port’s contamination maps while the group is formulating a recommendation about where roads and parks should go.
Du Pré expects Ecology will restrict some areas of the GP site to prohibit first-floor housing—a restriction Ecology put on redevelopment of the Holly Street Landfill. And she expects some restrictions on deep excavations, another common Ecology ruling.
Du Pré isn’t convinced digging up all the mercury is the best solution for the GP site.
“I don’t know if it’s always the best way, to dig it up and send it to someone else’s town,” she said. “These are the moral dilemmas I live with.”
Du Pré thinks GP got a sweetheart deal by being allowed to walk away from so much of an unknown amount of environmental liability. But she doesn’t want the Port, which is supported by taxpayers, to pay for a cleanup that would ready a pristine site for developers.
“Why should the public bear the cost of building a big high rise on the waterfront?” du Pré asks. “GP got to privatize the profits and socialize the costs. We all got to pay for the degradation [by living in the environment]. Now we get to pay for the cleanup?”
But Bellingham Bay Foundation contends a clean GP site, with predictable construction costs, would be so valuable to developers that it could more than pay back to taxpayers the cost of a thorough cleanup.
“We think it’s best to clean it up now,” said Lisa McShane, community relations director of Conservation Northwest and a member of Bellingham Bay Foundation. “The site’s empty. It will never be easier.”
She wonders who would want to spend much time in a building that requires mercury vapors to be vented, including classrooms Western Washington University is seeking to move to the GP site.
“I did not raise my child for 18 years to sit in a building with mercury vapors in it,” McShane said.
John Blethen, who chaired the environmental committee of the Waterfront Futures Group and is a former member of Bellingham Bay Foundation, said the Port is responsible for making the GP site safe for the community.
“They’re a taxpayer-driven organization. They need to be operating at a higher level morally than industry, Blethen said”
He wants it clean enough so people can live and work there comfortably, “for no other reason than in the future we might find even minute traces of mercury are incredibly toxic.”
Blethen thinks cleanup should be done at one time, “rather than going back, and back, and back—because you want to minimize the spreading of that stuff,” he said. “Once you’re starting to have people living there, the cleanup becomes incredibly hard making sure you’re not spreading dust and contamination.”
Blethen doesn’t remember any discussion in the Waterfront Futures Group of an environmental need to carve up mixed use areas for different types of development.
“I think we just assumed it would be cleaned up safe enough, so we could do a mixed use everywhere.”
Documents details levels of toxins
by Emily Weiner in Cascadia Weekly
When the Port of Bellingham prepares the land on the Georgia-Pacific site for redevelopment, how clean do you want the Port to leave the land? What level of land cleanup do you want the Port to pay for with your tax dollars?
The Bellingham Bay Foundation has submitted an initiative that Bellingham voters may see on the ballot in November, which seeks to let residents weigh in on those questions about cleanup of the land. (See sidebar for the initiative text and details about a June 8 public forum.)
Before focusing on land issues, a digression about water cleanup is necessary.
The BBF initiative seeks to allow residents to register their views on the question about cleanup of the Whatcom Waterway, which separates the two land masses of the GP site. There has been much public discussion about cleanup of the water. It’s been widely discussed that BBF favors dredging contaminated sediment out of Whatcom Waterway, depositing it in GP’s water treatment lagoon (“the ASB,” for Aerated Stabilization Basin), then covering it with impermeable material and topping that with soil to create a 30-acre waterfront park. The Port, which owns the GP site, prefers capping the contaminated sediments of Whatcom Waterway and dredging the ASB to create a marina partly encircled by public trails.
Public debate on cleanup of Whatcom Waterway will take place in a new framework this summer, when the state Department of Ecology releases the draft “RI/FS” for Whatcom Waterway. The document will consist of a “Remedial Investigation” that will define the nature and extent of the contamination and a “Feasibility Study” that will identify and evaluate a range of cleanup alternatives.
A draft RI/FS is prepared by the parties responsible for cleaning the site—in this case the Port of Bellingham—then reviewed and finalized by the Department of Ecology. At the end of public discussion of the draft RI/FS, Ecology will decide how the Port must clean up Whatcom Waterway.
Voters don’t decide how the mercury deposited by GP will be cleaned up, the Port doesn’t decide and the city doesn’t decide. Ecology decides. That’s why the BBF initiative asks the city to “use all reasonable means available to persuade the Department of Ecology and other stakeholders to approve a cleanup plan that permanently removes the maximum amount of contaminated sediments, including mercury, from the Whatcom Waterway.”
Lucy McInerney, of Ecology, who is in charge of the cleanup plans for both the Whatcom Waterway and the GP land, has said the draft RI/FS concludes that cleanup of Whatcom Waterway can proceed because there’s no danger that groundwater on the GP site will re-contaminate the bay.
Land cleanup
Ecology is more than two years away from issuing a draft RI/FS for the land component.
When GP owned the site, Ecology was working on an RI/FS that assumed the site would have only industrial activities, but Ecology changed course when notified the Port would buy the site and partner with the city for mixed-use development.
“It’s up to the community and the property owners to define land uses, so we can develop a cleanup that is protective under that land use,” McInerney explained.
Here’s the parts of the BBF initiative pertaining to decisions Ecology will make about land:
The BBF initiative directs the City to use all reasonable means to persuade Ecology and other stakeholders to approve the unrestricted cleanup standard for the GP mill site, if technically feasible. The measure also prohibits the City from advocating plans that clean the site to only an industrial standard. (The complete initiative text is included in a box on page 7).
Port of Bellingham Environmental Director Mike Stoner said the Port will perform a cleanup to the unrestricted standard under the state’s Model Toxics Control Act (MTCA), used for all properties not confined to industrial use. Ecology’s cleanup decisions are based on MTCA standards.
So is the BBF initiative unnecessary? Is there any reason for voters to ask the city to try to persuade Ecology to insist the Port clean the land beyond an industrial standard?
Performing the cleanup to the “unrestricted” MTCA standard doesn’t mean that all the land will be cleaned so thoroughly that its use would be unrestricted. When the Port says the land will be cleaned for mixed-use development, it doesn’t mean all uses will be possible in all areas. In particular, Stoner said cleaning some parts of the site to allow first-floor housing might be so expensive that developers would be unlikely to take on those costs.
“We’re trying to get to a situation where, from a MTCA perspective, housing could go anywhere, but we’re trying to be smart about where housing would be appropriate,” Stoner said.
The cleanup plan the Port has proposed Ecology adopt for the GP land would include severe use restrictions for six acres between Whatcom Waterway and Cornwall Avenue. That area was contaminated by mercury from GP’s chlor-alkali plant, which manufactured chlorine and sodium hydroxide (caustic) from 1965 until it was closed in 1999.
A Port internal document, dated May 15 of this year, lists the Port’s current remedial plan. The plan includes a combination of soil removal, in-place treatment and capping of mercury-contaminated soil; mercury vapor monitoring; a combination of focused groundwater treatment, control and long-term monitoring; and maintaining a cap at the Chem-Fix area.
The Chem-Fix area—about two acres just east of the log pond—is where GP in 1976 used the proprietary Chem-Fix process, which resembles concrete, to solidify mercury-contaminated wastewater sludge and sediment from the chlor-alkali plant. The solidified soils, averaging less than three feet thick, were covered with a plastic liner, half a foot of sand and about three inches of asphalt.
In September 2004, as part of its due diligence before purchasing the GP site and securing cleanup insurance, the Port had The Retec Group, an environmental consultant, characterize the cleanups expected to be required for land on different parts of the site. Retec’s document characterizes eight groupings of land and includes an eight-color map and a table estimating environmental compliance costs for each land group. (The Retec document is online at cascadiaweekly.com/cleanup.php)
Retec describes properties of concern that “contain types of concentrations of contaminants that are expected to limit future development uses.” Two areas, they say, “currently identified are located within the GP chlor-alkali plant area. These include the former ‘Chem-Fix’ disposal area, and the ‘caustic plume.’ Due to the presence of materials that Ecology considers listed hazardous wastes, penetration of the Chem-Fix area during development is likely to be effectively prohibited. In the caustic plume area, mercury vapor concentrations are elevated to the point that Ecology is expected to prohibit residential uses, depending on the type of remediation performed.”
Most of the GP site between Whatcom Waterway and Cornwall Avenue (excluding the narrow strip extending to the Cornwall Avenue Landfill and the Chem-Fix and chlor-alkali hot spots) is characterized as “low-level soil and impacted groundwater.” Retec wrote, “In these areas, non-industrial development will require placement of a soil or asphalt cap.”
Retec estimates the average incremental development costs for areas of the most intense contamination (designated Group 8) at $4.15 per square foot plus utility corridors and use restrictions, to comply with “Proposed Environmental Protection Standards.” Stoner explained that these estimates were based on Port assumptions about the amount of space that would be redeveloped as park, commercial and residential.
He said these estimates are the costs to maintain the protectiveness of the cleanup. For example, if a future building’s foundation would have to serve double duty as a seal for underground contamination—as does the foundation of the GP tissue warehouse—the extra cost for that double duty is included.
So what are the “Proposed Environmental Protection Standards” that would trigger these costs?
Two-phase remediation
“The Port plans to separate remediation activities into two phases,” Retec wrote. “The first phase of remediation will consist of those actions that are required to remediate site groundwater, or to comply with industrial cleanup levels.”
Retec uses the phrase “site cleanup” to mean getting the site to industrial cleanup levels.
The second phase Retec calls “environmental protection standards,” meaning “additional actions that are required if/when the property is converted to alternative (i.e. non-industrial) site uses.”
The Port wants Ecology to implement “environmental protection standards” as restrictive covenants during the initial cleanup action, rather than require the Port to clean the land to those standards.
To understand the Port’s intention vis a vis cleaning the GP site, it’s necessary to understand whether a statement is referring to “site cleanup” or to meeting “environmental protection standards.” It’s also crucial to understand which remediation the Port expects to do and which remediation the Port expects either the City or developers to do.
Who will pay?
So who will foot the bill for development to meet “environmental protection standards”?
Stoner said those costs will be borne at the time of future development, which could be decades away, and it’s not determined yet who will pay.
“It could be that the Port and a developer would share the costs in some allocation. It could be a developer would take on all the costs. It could be the Port and the city—there are a lot of possibilities,” Stoner said.
What will the cleanup insurance pay for?
Stoner said the insurance accommodates unrestricted land use. But when asked about whether insurance would pay for cleanup to make an area safe for first-floor housing, Stoner said that issue will be decided by both Ecology and the insurance company.
“When you get into a project that gets into cleanup activities and property development activities, it’s always a discussion of what is cleanup cost and what is property development cost,” he said
Leaders debate cleanup
Robyn du Pré, executive director of RE Sources, who is also on the Waterfront Advisory Group, began monitoring cleanup of GP contamination in 1998 when she was RE Source’s North Sound Bay Keeper. She thinks it would be helpful for WAG to look at the Port’s contamination maps while the group is formulating a recommendation about where roads and parks should go.
Du Pré expects Ecology will restrict some areas of the GP site to prohibit first-floor housing—a restriction Ecology put on redevelopment of the Holly Street Landfill. And she expects some restrictions on deep excavations, another common Ecology ruling.
Du Pré isn’t convinced digging up all the mercury is the best solution for the GP site.
“I don’t know if it’s always the best way, to dig it up and send it to someone else’s town,” she said. “These are the moral dilemmas I live with.”
Du Pré thinks GP got a sweetheart deal by being allowed to walk away from so much of an unknown amount of environmental liability. But she doesn’t want the Port, which is supported by taxpayers, to pay for a cleanup that would ready a pristine site for developers.
“Why should the public bear the cost of building a big high rise on the waterfront?” du Pré asks. “GP got to privatize the profits and socialize the costs. We all got to pay for the degradation [by living in the environment]. Now we get to pay for the cleanup?”
But Bellingham Bay Foundation contends a clean GP site, with predictable construction costs, would be so valuable to developers that it could more than pay back to taxpayers the cost of a thorough cleanup.
“We think it’s best to clean it up now,” said Lisa McShane, community relations director of Conservation Northwest and a member of Bellingham Bay Foundation. “The site’s empty. It will never be easier.”
She wonders who would want to spend much time in a building that requires mercury vapors to be vented, including classrooms Western Washington University is seeking to move to the GP site.
“I did not raise my child for 18 years to sit in a building with mercury vapors in it,” McShane said.
John Blethen, who chaired the environmental committee of the Waterfront Futures Group and is a former member of Bellingham Bay Foundation, said the Port is responsible for making the GP site safe for the community.
“They’re a taxpayer-driven organization. They need to be operating at a higher level morally than industry, Blethen said”
He wants it clean enough so people can live and work there comfortably, “for no other reason than in the future we might find even minute traces of mercury are incredibly toxic.”
Blethen thinks cleanup should be done at one time, “rather than going back, and back, and back—because you want to minimize the spreading of that stuff,” he said. “Once you’re starting to have people living there, the cleanup becomes incredibly hard making sure you’re not spreading dust and contamination.”
Blethen doesn’t remember any discussion in the Waterfront Futures Group of an environmental need to carve up mixed use areas for different types of development.
“I think we just assumed it would be cleaned up safe enough, so we could do a mixed use everywhere.”