Is Tempe-Coyotes site really ‘toxic liability’?
Team owners, opponents both partly right on issue
The Arizona Coyotes have touted their $2.1 billion project proposal in Tempe as an opportunity to “transform a landfill into a landmark,” and a public service to clean up the city’s “toxic liability” on their dime, not taxpayers’. Opponents of the deal contend the landfill is just a “compost heap,” which helps “to keep our parks green.”
An Arizona Republic analysis found the truth lies somewhere in between.
No more than two-thirds of the site is a landfill, but nearly all of it contains some amount of buried trash. The site isn’t toxic but does contain methane. And most of the trash isn’t near groundwater, but some of it lies below the water table.
“There are much worse contaminated properties in town and people have developed on them. This is not that bad,” said geotechnical engineer Chet Pearson, who has studied the Coyotes project site and others nearby.
The 46-acre property is Tempe’s “last bulk” of city-owned land. It’s located west of Town Lake at Rio Salado Parkway and Priest Drive, just south of the
Rio Salado riverbed.
Voters decide May 16 whether they want to sell it to the Coyotes to build a hockey arena, an entertainment district and nearly 2,000 apartments on the site. But residents still haven’t been told clearly whether they’d be selling a derelict dump, a potentially valuable piece of real estate, or both. Nothing will be clear until the digging starts.
The Republic’s review of three soils
reports going back 16 years, plus interviews with technical experts, found:
● The site did house a landfill. Each of the three soil studies conducted on the site since 2007 have found trash buried on the site, such as newspapers and pieces of plastic. Most of it is about 24 feet underground, according to the Coyotes’ 2018 soil study.
“We don’t really know what’s there ... but we don’t want any of it leaking into our water table. It’s going to have to be dealt with whether it’s officially toxic or not.”
Onnie Shekerjian,
former Tempe councilmember
● As little as 58% of the property and as much as 67% is a landfill; the rest is not. The Coyotes’ soil study only classified 14 of its 24 soil samples as “landfill” quality. Nearly 90% of the samples did have some amount of trash in them, including woodchips and “trace” levels of plastic.
● There’s no evidence that a significant portion of the site is “toxic.” The last time dangerous levels of toxins were found was in 2007. Just one of 25 soil samples collected for a study that year contained cancer-causing benzene and lead. Both are components of gasoline. The benzene has since decayed, according to Pearson. But lead doesn’t degrade.
● Methane could be the biggest issue. The gas can explode and has been blamed for a fire that broke out at the site last April. The 2007 study detected methane in three test areas — or 12% of the property — one of which had concentrations 25 times lower than what’s needed to ignite. But methane-producing bacteria have spent the past 16 years eating away at the site’s buried trash, so odds are that the level of methane has increased.
● On average, the trash is about 17 feet away from groundwater. Some have raised concerns about plastics seeping into groundwater because the landfill isn’t lined to prevent leakage. No evidence exists that that has happened,
but the Coyotes’ study found one instance of trash that had made its way below the water table, and four where it was less than 10 feet away. The other 19 samples were either garbage-free or had trash that was far above the water.
Pearson was the CEO of Geotechnical and Environmental Consultants, the company that Tempe hired to conduct the 2007 study. It remains the only report available that sought and detected toxic materials within the property.
The “typically pro-development” Tempe resident said he doesn’t have a position on whether residents should approve the Coyotes deal.
The Coyotes site, he said, was on par with hundreds of other properties he’s worked on, such as the neighboring Tempe Center of the Arts site.
“How they’re calling it toxic, I don’t understand,” he told The Republic. “If you emptied the acid from a car battery onto the soil, and it soaked into the soil, would it be a toxic landfill? No. It would be a small volume of impacted soils to handle appropriately.”
Pearson also said he’s never seen a clean-up that approaches the Coyotes’ $73 million estimate. The Coyotes stand by their figure and bear the cost, regardless. That’s one reason nearly every former and current city leader supports the project.
But if the land isn’t as bad as previously thought, it could open the door for Tempe to broker a more lucrative deal in the future.
Another big risk: the land could also be worse than expected, and Tempe could end up footing the cleanup bill if the Coyotes don’t buy the property.
“We don’t really know what’s there ... but we don’t want any of it leaking into our water table,” said former Tempe Councilmember Onnie Shekerjian. “It’s going to have to be dealt with whether it’s officially toxic or not.”
Voters have to decide if holding out for a potentially better deal is worth the risk of gambling away the first offer in decades to take remove Tempe landfill liability.
The deal calls for Tempe to use a portion of the new sales tax revenue generated on-site to help the Coyotes pay off its debt.
Without that incentive most developers would be priced out improving the site. But it would also divert roughly $300 million in new taxes away from city coffers over the next 30 years, a key sticking point for opponents.
However, if the cleanup won’t be as expensive, it would make it more likely that a developer would be able to absorb the cost, granting Tempe all new taxes from an alternative future project.