Brownfield Mitigation in FiDi Sparks Concerns
Residents who live adjacent to a Financial District construction site are raising concerns about air quality and environmental pollutants, prompting a call from City Council member Christopher Marte for stronger protective measures. But a spokesman for the project disputes that the work poses any dangers to nearby dwellings.
“We have been barely surviving work that is going on at 111 Washington Street,” says Esther Regelson, who lives next door at 109 Washington Street, a five-story building dating from 1885. “The site is a brownfield,” she continues, referring to a regulatory category that denotes land at which one or more contaminants are present at levels exceeding health-based or environmental standards. “They are working with heavy equipment and digging dirt with impunity,” she adds.
“I have been monitoring the air from inside my apartment,” Ms. Regelson notes, “and the day that they cut down all of the trees on the site was the day that my air monitor showed the first exceedance of particulate matter. Since that day, my monitor has been reading ‘unhealthy’ to ‘hazardous’ levels almost daily. Further, there has been no evidence of the workers on site taking any precautions for their own exposures.”
James Pederson, who also lives at 109 Washington, says, “for over a year we have attempted, through a number of elected officials, to initiate a direct dialogue with the developers. A meeting was set up last summer, but was subsequently cancelled by the developers and never rescheduled. Further efforts to meet were rebuffed. A few months ago they agreed to email me weekly updates on the progress and activities at the site, but have not made good on that. Clearly, they have no intention of engaging with us. They are impacting our lives in extremely dangerous and disruptive ways and obviously feel they have no responsibility towards us. It’s very frustrating that we can’t get much help from the City either.” He adds that, “only Mr Marte’s office responded.”
A spokesman for the developer of 111 Washington Street, Grubb Properties, says that the company is setting up a system to keep neighbors regularly informed about remediation and construction work via email, which will be in place in the near future.
Soil cleanup work is underway at the 111 Washington Street construction site (also known as Eight Carlisle Street) to prepare for a planned 65-story residential building. The project has aroused concerns because previous uses of the quarter-acre site include a scrap metal dealership, a warehouse, and a factory for fabricating awnings and flags. Most recently, a parking garage was constructed there in 1977, and demolished in 2010. This garage included a 3,000-gallon underground fuel storage tank, which remains buried at the site.
A spokesman for Grubb properties says, “as we begin remediation work, our top priority is the health and safety of the surrounding community and our construction team. At every step, we have adhered to all required safety and public reporting measures under the State’s rigorous Brownfields Cleanup Program—and even gone above and beyond those requirements to ensure that our neighbors are safe throughout the process. We look forward to starting work to deliver 462 much-needed apartments, including 140 affordable homes for New Yorkers. We will continue to keep our neighbors informed as remediation continues and will continue to strictly follow all safety requirements.”
According to documents filed by environmental consultants working for the developer, multiple “contaminants of concern” have been identified at the site, including “VOCs [volatile organic compounds], SVOCs [semi-volatile organic compounds], metals and pesticides in soil, metals in groundwater, and VOCs in soil vapor. The presence of VOCs were attributed to historical site uses, including refueling operations and the use of an UST [underground storage tank] for petroleum. Soil vapor contaminants exist at a range from ‘no further action needed’ to ‘resample or mitigate.’ The presence of VOCs within soil vapor were attributed to an unidentified source.” Among the pollutants detected at the site, according to documents on file with the State’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), are arsenic, barium, lead, mercury, benzene, naphthalene, chloroform, acetone, isopropanol, and ethanol.
The Grubb spokesman counters that the contaminants detected at 111 Washington (while not harmless) have been measured at low concentrations and are commonly found at many urban construction sites. The developer’s representative also disputes that the air quality around the site is dangerous, pointing to a Community Air Monitoring Plan (CAMP) that began on May 30, along with daily dust suppression measures, such as water spraying.
Grubb has applied to participate in the DEC’s “brownfield cleanup program,” which aims to encourage private-sector cleanups of contaminated sites “to promote their redevelopment as a means to revitalize economically blighted communities,” according to the DEC. By what criteria Lower Manhattan qualifies as an “economically blighted community” was not immediately clear.
The brownfield cleanup program provides tax incentives for the redevelopment of urban sites and has inspired criticism because such subsidies are calculated as a percentage of the overall value of a development project, rather than being capped at the cost of the cleanup. (For example, the developers of the Clinton Green project, a 15-story luxury residential and retail development in Midtown, claimed $47.2 million in such tax credits, after incurring just $13.6 million in brownfield cleanup costs.)
On June 1, City Council member Christopher Marte wrote to the City DOB and State DEC commissioners, noting 11 open violations at 111 Washington Street, issued by the City’s Environmental Control Board (ECB), and voicing concern that “remediation work with no clear air quality mitigation plan in place has led to spiking levels of air contamination at 109 Washington Street and the surrounding area.”
“I formally request an immediate pause of any work on site, followed by a comprehensive inspection of impact mitigation, structural shoring, and tenant protection practices by the appropriate agencies,” Mr. Marte wrote.
A Grubb spokesman says that the open ECB violations date from before the company purchased 111 Washington Street, and that the CAMP system, implemented two days before Mr. Marte’s letter, complies with all requirements of the DEC’s Brownfields Cleanup Program. Among these are a public participation plan, which includes online fact sheets, an index of applicable documents, and daily reports of air monitoring data.
A spokesman for the City DOB said that the agency will be responding shortly to Council member Marte’s letter and is in the process of scheduling an inspection to investigate further the issues he raised. A representative for the State DEC did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. Marte’s letter.