For a case study in how the Environmental Protection Agency inhibits economic and environmental revitalization, head straight to Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal.
Since 2004, New York developer Toll Brothers City Living has worked on a plan to revitalize the canal, which is one of the most toxic urban waterways in the country. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was completely on board, believing that Toll Brothers had a sensible plan for cleaning the 1.8 mile-long channel and transforming the mostly industrial neighborhood with 450 housing units and 2,000 square feet of retail.
But the EPA upended all of this six months ago when it declared the canal a Superfund site. "We're out. Completely out," David Von Spreckelsen, a senior vice president at Toll Brothers, tells me.
That's because under the EPA the cleanup is likely to take 12 years, perhaps more. The Superfund designation allows the EPA to go after the polluters ("responsible polluting partners"), which include dozens of private companies as well as the U.S. Navy and the City of New York. The city owned or operated several facilities on the canal during much of the 20th century, including an asphalt plant, a coal plant and an incinerator. According to EPA spokesperson Elizabeth Totman, the city could be liable for paying part of the EPA's estimated $300 million to $500 million bill.
Needless to say, the Bloomberg administration was not happy. City officials said the listing would drive out hundreds of millions of dollars in investment that had already started in the area.
Toll Brothers is the most prominent case in point. "Superfund creates a stigma we couldn't get around," says Mr. Von Spreckelsen. "We couldn't get financing or insurance at a reasonable number. We'd be trying to get loans and to market apartments while there would be men walking around in white suits. It's just not doable."
Some neighborhood activists are happy with the Superfund designation. Linda Mariano, co-founder of Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus, tells me she opposes "premature development." She argues that "the neighborhood belongs to the people--not to the private developers and not for the kind of Atlantic Yards overdevelopment this mayor has been advocating for. The EPA will do a significant cleanup so that we can reuse the brownfields as open space, recreation, adaptive reuse for light industry and artisans."
But it's not as if Toll Brothers wasn't planning to clean the site. It had been going forward under an alternative route--the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation's voluntary Brownfield Cleanup Program, which provides tax breaks for cleaning the site and preparing it for building. Like every industrial site that gets rezoned for residential use by New York City, this one got an "E" designation, which requires that it pass inspection before a building permit is issued.
"The city had $150 million ready to go to clean up the canal, versus the Superfund, with just enough money to do another study for two years," Bill Appel, executive director of the Gowanus Community Development Organization, tells me. "Superfund is a misnomer. It's not super, and it doesn't have any funds." Others point out that the EPA's solution is only going to preserve the pollution for longer.
There's no question that the pollution is serious. Carved out of tidal wetlands and freshwater streams in the mid-19th century when environmental standards were almost nonexistent, the Gowanus Canal was poorly designed, even by the standards of the day. For one thing, it was built without locks and open only on one end, relying on the tides to flush wastes. Tidal flushing was never sufficient, and as industry grew on its banks toxic pollutants poured in--not to mention millions of gallons in raw sewage.
EPA Superfund Director Walter Mugdan, who oversees New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, says tests have shown that the sediment in the canal is seriously contaminated with a variety of pollutants, including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heavy metals. But the most difficult and expensive problem may be the coal tar, otherwise known as black mayonnaise.
From the 1860s through much of the 1950s, three manufactured gas plants dumped their coal tar into the ground and probably into the canal. National Grid, one of the world's largest utilities, "owns" the liability for the coal tar, not because it ever polluted itself but because it acquired predecessor companies, such as Brooklyn Union Gas and Keyspan, that did. Mr. Mugdan is confident that National Grid will become the major payer.
But on what timetable? "If EPA had come in 35 or 40 years ago they would have been more than welcome," says lifetime Gowanus resident Buddy Scotto. "But they are announcing their designation just as the private sector gets ready to clean and invest. It will take the EPA several years just to evaluate all the work that we've done--much less start anything. Plus they have to get the money from the polluters--and most have disappeared."
It's a bad situation, but one that the Bloomberg administration can turn to the city's advantage. The EPA has promised an expedited, fully funded cleanup. "We sleep, we eat, we dream the Gowanus Canal," EPA project manager Christos Tsiamis said in a public hearing earlier this year. The Bloomberg administration should hold the EPA to its promises.
Ms. Vitullo-Martin is director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Regional Plan Association.
