City secretly OK’d purchase of West Village land
Site purchased for $ 36.9M, despite warnings of extent of toxic soil
Calgary’s city council secretly approved the $ 36.9- million purchase of contaminated land — now being pitched as part of the site for a new downtown arena and stadium complex — despite expert reports that warned the extent of the pollution and potential cleanup costs needed further investigation.
Dozens of monitoring wells drilled on the site of a former wood- preserving plant after the deal was inked in 2009 revealed the amount of toxic soil left by the operator was much larger than originally believed and extended under much of the 4.2- hectare parcel the city had just purchased.
Remediation costs for the 18- hectare area once occupied by Canada Creosoting Ltd. had been estimated at between $ 30 million and $ 100 million when the city purchased the parcel and approved its West Village redevelopment plan.
But a year later, engineers were telling city officials the plume of naphthalene, benzopyrene and pentachlorophenol left behind from four decades of treating rail ties and utility poles at the site was larger than presented in previous studies and extended down into the bedrock about 10 metres below the surface.
The report by AECOM Canada Ltd. now estimated that the equivalent of 25,000 dump trucks of earth was considered hazardous waste, so laced with toxins that can produce carcinogenic vapours that they would likely need to be hauled away or intensively remediated before the area could be built on again. A spokeswoman for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation said city council and its administrators behaved irresponsibly.
“If it was their pocketbooks on the line, I’m sure they would have done their due diligence,” Paige MacPherson said.
“This land should never have been bought — and no one should be talking about building on it now — until we know what it’s going to cost to clean up and who is going to pay.”
When council approved the purchase of the GSL Chevrolet dealership lands at an in camera session a year earlier, a report from the city’s corporate services department noted that an environmental review was underway and that any concerns would be reported.
But a Herald investigation has found city officials already had two reports that raised serious concerns about the purchase.
“Further assessment is required to determine the extent of the contamination,” city environmental technologist Cynthia Ouellet said in a June 2008 memo to land division manager Lynne Craig.
“Since the early 1990s, no delineation of the contamination has been performed.”
A report by outside engineers completed just days before the proposed deal went to council warned the test methods used in previous soil sampling at the plant site understated the extent of the contamination.
The review by Matrix Solutions Inc. recommended drilling more boreholes and monitoring wells using up- to- date techniques and “assessing the data to determine the potential liability for the site.”
When the plant was shuttered by a predecessor company of Domtar Inc. in the mid- 1960s, the site was covered with clean fill and sold to developers.
The extent of the problem was discovered in the late 1980s when engineers working on a government program to identify abandoned contaminated landfills around the province found creosote oozing into the Bow River from the former plant site.
The province spent $ 12.5 million during the 1990s to clean globs of creosote from the bottom of the waterway, construct a containment wall to try to stop more of the toxic liquid from entering the river and install wells to extract and treat tainted groundwater from the site.
Despite the fact the 2009 report to council said the city was assuming an unknown environmental liability in purchasing the land, minutes show an overwhelming majority voted to forge ahead. That majority included five current incumbents, now Alberta finance minister Joe Ceci, current NDP byelection candidate Bob Hawkesworth and interim Tory Leader Ric McIver.
Only Dale Hodges and Andre Chabot dissented.
“The rest were hoping for the best, but I don’t live in that kind of world,” Hodges said.
“If they wanted my vote, they needed to tell me what it would cost to clean up, and they couldn’t.”
Chabot said he hesitated for the same reason.
“I was worried we were buying a liability instead of an asset,” Chabot said.
Even today, city officials are unable to provide the Herald with a cost estimate for cleaning up the site, although some estimates have pegged the price as high as $ 300 million.
“Cost estimates ... will depend on the proposed use of the land, which will dictate the extent and type of any remediation or risk management plan required for that use,” city spokesman Ed Conway said in an email reply to questions.
But provincial officials have been very clear with the city that Alberta has a policy of not allowing residential dwellings to be on “risk managed areas” and will allow contaminated land to be redeveloped only if the soil is cleaned up sufficiently to meet strict government guidelines for groundwater contamination.
Responding in March 2010 to the city’s plan for a mixed- use community on the brownfields site that would be home to 12,000 people, a contaminated site specialist with the environment department warned city planners the policy was necessary to protect human health and ensure there were no above- ground obstacles that would restrict additional monitoring or cleanup if they became necessary.
“It will be 20- 30 years before the development is scheduled to take place,” said Warren Riley, “and this time offers the opportunity for the city to work to actively remediate and reduce the area of contaminant impact.”
While the ownership of the city’s NHL and CFL franchises has pegged the cost of its proposed complex at $ 890 million, that figure does not include any money for cleanup of the site.
Mayor Naheed Nenshi said in a prepared statement that the proposed site requires “significant expenditures” to remediate environmental contamination that is “unfunded.” mmcclure@ calgaryherald. com Twitter: @ mattmcclure2