Recycling Land
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June/July 2000
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Features
Cleaner Air Coming to Detroit
Henry Ford Hospital to Close Incinerator
by Mary Beth Doyle
Selling Their Future Short?
Engler Panel Ignores Doctors' Advice
by Dave Dempsey
Recycling Land
Brownfield Redevelopment is a Balancing Act of Priorities
by Mike Tolinski
Dumbing Down the Children
Michigan, Other States Ignore Federal Lead Testing Law
by Peter Montague
Columns
Tiny Township Turns Down GM
Rural Milan Residents Reject Rail-Car Yard, by Aretta Schills
Diet, Health, and the Environment
An Interview with John Robbins, by Rachel Shaw
Healthy Home and Garden
Energy Star Products Save Cash and Power, by Kristi Jacques
Huron Valley News
Webster Township Holds Sprawl Forum, by Ernie Becker
Science for the People
Pesticides Linked to Decreased Fertility, by Mary Beth Doyle
Redeveloping idle properties in Ypsilanti is a balancing act of priorities
By Mike Tolinski
Like many other older industrial cities, Ypsilanti faces a challenging legacy of past use and abuse at its "brownfield" sites. Government-sponsored loans and tax credits and reductions in Michigan's clean-up standards make it more economical to redevelop contaminated brownfields - but at what risk to the people working there or living nearby?
For economically stagnant communities, the benefits of brownfield projects are enticing: rejuvenating old properties can strengthen a city's urban core, increase its tax base, and impede urban sprawl. Researchers have estimated that over 200,000 new jobs could be created if the majority of the nation's brownfields were redeveloped.
For a community like Ypsilanti, which has several old industrial and commercial sites, brownfield redevelopment may seem like only a positive thing. The city has already claimed success in a few projects, and it's particularly excited about its plans to transform its Water Street area (along a bend in the Huron River) into a thriving business center for shopping, restaurants, and residences.
The detailed plans for Water Street are part of a long-term strategy for the city, according to Jennifer Goulet, who was the director of Ypsilanti's Economic Development Department until recently. "We're an older historic city with very little vacant land for development, so our emphasis has to be on redeveloping those areas that are really not being used to their best potential," she says. But she admits that some of these areas carry issues of contamination that could be of concern to the public.
With any redevelopment project, developers must constantly consider two big questions: Is the drive to redevelopment, along with weakened decontamination standards, putting the public at risk? And is the public getting adequate access to the decision-making mechanics behind redevelopment?
How Clean is Clean?
Adequate clean-up standards for brownfields have been debated since the 1980 federal "Superfund" act, which held owners and buyers of contaminated land liable for its hidden dangers. Michigan's state cleanup law - enacted in 1990 - also contained strict liability provisions. But rather than spurring clean-up efforts, the laws resulted in old industrial land sitting idle and polluted for years.
Eventually, states began loosening up the rules for brownfield redevelopment; for instance, Michigan's 1995 Natural Resources Protection Act included amendments that exempt a new owner from liability, specifying only vaguely that owners must use "due care" when decontaminating property for reuse. From this point on, clean-up practices have focused more on shielding people from contaminants during future land use rather than on removing the contamination.
"The basic premise of the 1995 changes was to allow more contamination to remain where it is instead of cleaning it up," explains Dave Dempsey of the Michigan Environmental Council. "Inherent in that policy is that it can create a health risk." He adds that the whole policy is based on the assumption that businesses will "do the right thing" and control contamination exposure. "But we've trusted businesses for 100 years and that's why we we've got contaminated sites in this state.
"In the past we didn't rely on good intentions. From 1990-95, we actually had laws that required pretty strict clean-up standards that were still flexible enough that particular clean-ups could be adjusted to fit local circumstances. Now we have a perception that the material doesn't need to be cleaned up."
The 1995 laws effectively reduced fears of liability, but were these "fears" real in the first place? Dempsey says it's questionable. "There was an issue of people who bought property not knowing it was contaminated being liable for the whole cost of the cleanup. That's sort of the horror story that drove some of the amendments. But those were relatively few cases and to my knowledge, the state never actually sued anybody who was not responsible for the contamination." He said the legislature was driven more by "horror stories" than by facts.
The supposed threats of liability may have deterred some companies and banks from investing in redevelopment, but Dempsey says that problem could have been addressed without the reductions in clean-up standards. "If you simply went after the responsible parties that caused the problems you could have saved a lot of public expense," he says. "Those public dollars could have gone a lot farther than they are, because now we're spending them at a lot more sites."
Using a financial carrot to attract businesses to brownfields has also been well exploited by Michigan. Legislation in 1996 was intended to open up brownfields redevelopment by providing government assistance and financial incentives for companies willing to renew old sites. The Brownfield Redevelopment Financing Act allowed for the creation of city and county committees for evaluating local redevelopment projects, while a companion act made public money available for financing cleanup costs. An amendment also opened up single-business tax credits for companies entering into redevelopment, which has become the primary motivation for many developers. To add to this bonanza, the Engler administration has just announced bills that will increase the potential tax credit per project by thirty times - to $30 million - but without increasing the standards for decontaminating brownfields.
Incentives like these counteract the "disincentives" in previous laws that held companies accountable for pollution on land they purchased, observes Marge Whittemore, deputy director of business development for Wayne County. "The law changed so that when you buy a piece of property now, you can do a baseline environmental assessment that will identify the level of contamination on the property," says Whittemore. "You're not responsible for that contamination, [but] you are responsible to make sure that people aren't exposed to something unhealthy. And you're not stuck with the liability [to clean up] contamination caused by somebody else."
Perhaps not surprisingly, industry supporters of brownfields redevelopment tend to favor the new incentives and lower standards about how much a site should be cleaned up before it is considered "safe." They argue that "unreasonable" requirements for remediating a site are uneconomical and merely force new industrial growth out to undeveloped suburban land. Reduced decontamination standards also require less public money, which allows even more brownfields redevelopment.
A Delicate Balance
The balancing act of economics and safety is playing out in Ypsilanti. Recent and continuing redevelopment projects in the city are grappling with how to meet the city's goals for re-using idle land while protecting the public from contamination. Jennifer Goulet says the city has been very aggressive in tapping into the various state and federal resources for reclaiming brownfield sites, while keeping the processes open to the public, as much as possible, at key points in each process.
Besides the massive commercial plans for the Water Street area, one recent industrial project allowed a screw and bolt manufacturer to move from an inadequate urban site to an unused site on the city's outskirts. Exemplar Manufacturing relied solely on grants from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) for reclaiming the site, says Goulet. After its history as a mixed residential, commercial, and agricultural neighborhood, the abandoned property (which is just off I-94) was designated a federal urban renewal site. However, no redevelopment plans sparked until the city teamed up with Exemplar, according to Goulet.
The initial environmental assessments of the property were revealing. Assessors found underground storage tanks (which must be removed, by state law), old building foundations, and some soil that was contaminated "above the residential threshold," she says. Rather than removing the soil, developers moved it elsewhere within the property, using it for grading and berms, "and capping it with a sufficient depth of clean soil so that there would be no danger or public contact with those materials. So that assisted in some of the costs of environmental clean-up because we didn't have to take everything off site and dispose of it," Goulet argues.
The company has successfully installed itself at the reclaimed site-and meanwhile, back on the north side of town, the site Exemplar had vacated attracted the attention of another company. "The city was concerned that the older industrial site would likely sit vacant for a long time," admits Goulet. Luckily, New Arbor Technologies, a New York-based paper-pulp recycler, saw value in reclaiming the site.
New Arbor had been considering a vacant site outside of town, "but when they learned that this property would be available, they were really interested to move," says Goulet. "As a company that positions itself as a recycling company, they turned towards recycling older industrial property, rather than developing a greenfield site." This spring, the company will be closing on the property deal and selling bonds for renovating not only the land, but the existing building as well.
But in this project, environmental priorities are again battling with economics. Rather than removing existing soil contamination, which Goulet says is not severe, the MDEQ is helping the developer design a new storm-water retention pond to prevent water run-off from flowing into the Huron River. Other contamination issues at the site include old transformers, asbestos, and oil and grease in the building's interior - which must be removed to suit the new company's "clean" operation.
Goulet adds that the MDEQ won't pay for interior clean-up if there's no danger to the surrounding environment, but the city is planning on diverting future property taxes from the site to the developer to compensate for the renovation costs (a pay-back period that will take about 13 years).
Goulet says people living in surrounding residential areas will appreciate the renovations, especially since the new site layout won't require the large trucks that service the plant to go through adjacent neighborhoods, as in the past. So far, the public has not opposed the redevelopment process, although she admits that most of the local residents are itinerant EMU students who might not be as motivated to voice their concerns.
The city is also considering other redevelopment projects for troubled properties. On Grove Street, one potential project will replace an old diesel fueling station that's adjacent to an historic neighborhood. Goulet says that at this site, initial assessments show that the site's storage tanks have leaked, an issue that will need to be addressed. At another site off Forest Street (north of Depot Town), the city had also been exploring options for leveling an old molasses plant and readying the site for new development.
Paving It Over
But some say that redevelopment "success stories" like these - while emphasizing how companies and cities have taken advantage of public money and tax breaks - don't address enough whether brownfield decontamination efforts are adequate. The fact that some redeveloped brownfields are still basically "brown" is what bothers many environmentalists. Even the phrase "cleanup" is open to debate; Dave Dempsey says it might now merely refer to paving over soil contamination, fencing it off, burying it somewhere on site, or constructing a building on top of it.
Marge Whittemore agrees. "You may not have to clean it up at all; it depends on the nature of the contamination. A lot of times what you need to do is just protect the public from the contamination." For example, she points to a Wayne County industrial project where a warehousing company expanded onto a contaminated site. The company did have to remove some soils and make sure the construction workers were protected, but it was the warehouse's large concrete floor and a big parking lot that "basically took care of the problem" by covering up the remaining contamination. "Back in the old days you had to clean the property so that if a kid were playing on it and eating the soil, it would be clean [enough]. And you don't have to do that anymore," she says.
But what does this mean for non-industrial projects like Water Street, where children will be running free? Whittemore thinks that individual communities would recognize that careful cleaning of these sites is imperative. And the degree of decontamination is a local decision that concerned people in a community can influence, says Donele Wilkins, executive director of the community advocacy group Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice.
"It's very important that people in the community participate in the decision-making about the redevelopment of brownfields, because the brownfield development authorities have great flexibility," she says. "They don't have to go with the minimal requirements; they can go beyond basic clean-up standards."
Stakeholder Input
Wilkins emphasizes that those with interests at stake in brownfield redevelopment aren't just businesses and government authorities, but the people in the community itself. "I really believe that when a community is involved and informed throughout the process (and informed enough to effectively contribute to the process), they can avoid all kinds of problems."
Economically troubled communities may have special enthusiasm for downtown developments like Water Street, but a lack of information about contamination on a selected site limits the public debate and causes distrust. "If you don't know the impact - if you're in the dark about what possible health risks can exist - certainly you can be afraid," says Wilkins. "That's why it's really important the people have information and effectively engage in a public process that allows questions to be answered." She adds that the people making the decisions also must have the "will" to address the public's concerns and add extra precautions to a project as necessary.
For the Water Street project and other brownfield projects, Jennifer Goulet claims that public participation is a primary goal. She points to public forums that have discussed Water Street's new layout design and environmental assessment, which have successively drawn larger crowds. "Our following has been growing on this project, which has been great."
She says contamination issues around Water Street "are nothing significant enough to stop the development proposal," but they still warrant public discussion. After all, contamination is rarely a simple "yes or no" issue. For instance, Goulet says assessors found an area where non-chemical construction debris had been dumped. Since the non-toxic material isn't solid enough to build on, developers are considering a wider "greenbelt" along the area to accommodate it, rather than excavation. Still, an issue like this, which concerns a residential zone of the Water Street development, is an especially relevant topic for public discussion.
Fighting the Trends
Still, it may appear that political and economic interests are controlling more and more of the processes behind brownfields redevelopment. Citizen demands that a site be decontaminated to its original condition irk industry consultants who claim it's usually unnecessary. And their complaints may gradually weaken regulators' authority unless local communities stand behind the tougher standards.
As long as local people have a say in the decision-making behind brownfields projects such as Ypsilanti's, and they lobby for protective cleanups, "land recycling" has great potential. Idle urban areas in Michigan could again become sources of livelihood, mixing "new" industries with the "old."
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