Superfund the Mahoning?

An article in today’s Times spotlights the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and the debate pitting the desire for environmental cleanup against the fear of falling property values.

City officials and many residents fear that the Superfund label, reserved for the worst contamination in the country and evoking health emergencies like the Love Canal debacle of the 1970s, could deter new development in the area that the canal wends its way through as it narrows to a few hundred feet wide — near Gowanus, Carroll Gardens and Red Hook.

City officials said that the listing could jeopardize more than $500 million committed to the waterfront for two private projects involving more than 1,200 housing units.

Experts on contaminated sites said that a Superfund listing typically stirs contradictory emotions. On one hand, some people who live nearby may feel demoralized and even frightened by the finding of serious contamination and worry about its impact on real estate values; on the other, some are often relieved to get a firm commitment to clean up the toxic substances in their midst.

We’ve already got low property values. Do we stand to lose anything by lobbying for this kind of cleanup? Will the approaches used in the cleanup be ones we would otherwise want? The last time I spoke with a friend knowledgeable about the state of the river cleanup, she suggested we didn’t want the Army Corps of Engineers to move too quickly with their cleanup, as they wanted basically cover up and contain the pollution in the soil, while there are experiments underway that aim to remediate it.

According to the Gowanus article, by accepting Superfund status, all control is ceded to the EPA. What would we gain in exchange for loss of supervision?

City environmental officials say they would welcome a cleanup, but not the stigma of a Superfund designation, which authorizes federal officials to pursue parties responsible for the pollution, and have them pay for the removal of hazards. They object to that process because it can extend the cleanup period into decades.

This is, indeed, one of the issues surrounding cleanup of the Mahoning. The majority of our polluters are long gone. In order to recover funding for the cleanup, the government is loath to simply declare them gone, rather they’re following down the chain of mergers and insolvencies to determine who will pick up the tab in their stead.

At least one housing developer, Toll Brothers, has threatened to scrap its building plans if the Superfund designation goes through. Like other real estate companies, it already faces the challenge of a depressed housing market. Ethan Geto, a Toll Brothers spokesman, said a Superfund listing could torpedo its plan for a complex of 460 housing units on three acres by the canal.

“To market residential units at a Superfund site is virtually impossible,” he said.

The irony is unmistakable: so, they’ll market to folks on a site that qualifies as a Superfund site, as long as it’s not so designated.

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