The Bloomberg administration last night said the feds’ controversial plan to declare Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal a Superfund site stinks, contending that such a designation would delay ongoing cleanup efforts and potentially kill more than $400 million in private development planned near the waterway.
During a public forum held last night at PS 32 in Carroll Gardens, Daniel Walsh, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Environmental Remediation, said he hoped the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would instead work with the city and state to find an alternate approach to cleaning the long-polluted canal rather than bank on the complex time-consuming Superfund approach of “finding responsible parties for past contamination.”
“Of the 1,500 federal Superfund sites to date, no river cleanup has been successfully completed,” he said. “This is not the EPA’s fault, but it does speak to the enormous complexity of identifying responsible parties and suggests that a cleanup could very likely take more than two decades.”
He also said the designation would “jeopardize” the jobs, private sector cleanups, affordable housing and clean open space that is expected through planned developments.
After the EPA last week announced its desire to add the canal to the Superfund program, developer Toll Brothers threatened to kill a city-approved 577-unit housing project to go up Bond, Carroll and Second streets.
It is not far from where other Gowanus-based developments are planned, including a 68,000-square-foot Whole Foods superstore on Third Street and a mixed-use city project, “Public Place,” from Fifth Street south to Nelson Street, that is expected to bring 500 to 1,000 units of housing.
Walsh said the city has set aside $175 million to clean up the canal, with the first contract for work to be handed out by June 30. This includes the installation of a new pumping station and a flushing tunnel at the head of the canal.
But EPA officials throughout the session repeatedly said they believe the only way the canal would be cleaned effectively is through Superfund designation.
The agency agreed to add the canal to its list of national priorities after Pete Grannis, commissioner of the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, wrote to EPA Dec. 12 and asked the feds to take over the cleanup of the waterway through the Superfund program.
The crowd of over 200 people at the meeting was split on whether the Superfund designation is best but nearly all agreed the canal needs to be cleaned — and as soon as possible. Some fear classifying it a Superfund area would drive down property values in Carroll Gardens, Gowanus and adjacent neighborhoods.
The EPA is in the process of soliciting public comment on the plan for 60 days before deciding whether to add the canal to the Superfund cleanup program.
Although most of the industrial activity along the canal has stopped, high contaminant levels remain in the sediments, the EPA says. Sampling has shown the sediments in the Gowanus Canal to be contaminated with a variety of pollutants, including pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), metals and volatile organic contaminants (VOCs), and significant contamination associated with coal tar.
In the past few years, traces of the clap and gonorrhea have also been uncovered. That being said, local neighborhood organizations have significantly helped clean parts of the canal through various initiatives over the past couple of decades.