Techcetera
TechCity struggles with toxic legacy
By LYNN WOODS
With
its 2.5 million square feet of office, warehouse and
manufacturing space, more than half of it empty, TechCity,
the former IBM manufacturing facility located in the
town of Ulster, is considered the most significant economic
development site in Ulster County. However, a big stumbling
block to redevelopment has been its designation as an
Environmental Protection Agency-designated Superfund
site, stemming from the spillage of toxic solvents into
the groundwater decades ago. In the late 1980s the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency issued a permit under
the Resources Conservation and Recovery Act, which is
administered by the state Department of Environmental
Conservation (DEC), to IBM to monitor, contain and ultimately
clean up the site.
While only 43 acres contain significant levels of the
pollutants, the entire 260-acre site is under the constraints
of the permit. That makes it difficult for Alan Ginsberg,
the owner of TechCity, to market and possibly sell off
portions of the site to commercial developers. Upon
purchasing the property from IBM in the 1990s, Ginsberg
assumed unlimited liability, a burden that would be
passed onto any subsequent owner of portions of the
property.
To free up the unaffected areas of the property for
redevelopment, last year Ginsberg, accompanied by local
economic development leaders, elected officials and
at least one environmentalist – Ned Sullivan, executive
director of Scenic Hudson – began negotiations with
the DEC about freeing up two parcels from the constraints
of the permit. Collectively amounting to 30 acres, the
properties are not within the 43 acres in which high
levels of the chemicals have been detected and hence
don’t represent the same risk to a prospective developer.
But modifying the permit is a more complicated, time-consuming
process than the owner hoped. “The presumption was that
by the end of last year, we would have had the permit
modification approved,” said Tom Kacandes, director
of business development at TechCity. Instead, at this
point the DEC is requiring more testing. “There’s a
discrepancy between (the testing that’s) been done and
what DEC thinks still needs to be done,” Kacandes said.
“A dispute arose about validity of some of the data”
from TechCity’s testing, which seeks to establish the
boundaries of the detectable pollutants.
“There’s so little solvent here, literally you’re at
the edge of what the techniques can detect in a valid
way,” Kacandes said. “Our concern is that the required
testing is going to get expensive,” he said, noting
that Ginsberg has spent “several hundreds of thousands
of dollars in little over two years” on getting the
samples.
“The DEC moves slower than we would like,” said March
Gallagher, chairperson of the Ulster County Industrial
Development Agency. “From an economic development perspective,
we want to move it along.” However, she acknowledged
the permit modification “is a new idea. The DEC wants
to make sure nobody is exposed to anything bad,” a priority
for the county as well, she said.
Gary Casper, a senior engineering geologist in the DEC’s
division of solid hazardous materials, said in order
to remove the parcels from the permit, “we need institutional
controls to make sure the remaining contaminants are
not disturbed. We need to make sure we haven’t missed
anything.”
Casper said the testing samples by TechCity “did not
indicate a problem” but “for technical reasons were
unacceptable.” The DEC will be taking “split samples”
of the new tests from TechCity so that it can simultaneously
do its own tests. The two parcels also have different
levels of the chemicals, which includes trichloroethylene,
a probable carcinogenic that has been banned by the
European Union and was widely used at U.S. military
sites.
One of the parcels – it’s the location of several mostly
empty warehouse buildings – has higher levels of solvents.
The other, where the Bank of America building is located,
has fewer solvents, but is also contaminated by PCBs,
left from a former elevator system; those contaminants
are not currently an issue but could be if the site
were ever disturbed. Casper said part of the solution
to releasing the two parcels from the permit would be
to require both sites to be continually monitored.
According to Wayne Mizerak, project engineer in the
DEC’s division of environmental remediation for Region
Three, the challenge is defining the edges of the plume
of hazardous solvents, which are located in ground water
10 to 30 feet below the surface on the east side of
Enterprise Drive. (The DEC officials said the plume
is safely contained, partly through construction of
a trench.) Mizerak said he expected all the data to
be collected by the end of March “at the latest.”
Besides contamination of the ground water and soils,
another issue is possible vaporization and migration
of the chemicals in the building interiors. However,
Casper said this is not a barrier to future development.
“Especially with vacant and new buildings, it’s easy
to engineer a fix, simply by putting in a barrier and
depressuring system. It’s very effective.” For prospective
developers, he acknowledged the levels of contamination
aren’t so much the problem as “the stigma” of being
a designated superfund site.
Kacandes also takes issue with the slow method of cleanup
currently deployed by IBM. “Going from a high concentration
to a low concentration of chemicals has taken 30 years.
But to get from a low concentration to non-detectable
can take decades.”
He said that according to remediation contractors he’s
talked with, more aggressive techniques, which would
involve pumping compressed air into the ground water,
have been developed that could complete the clean up
in a couple of years and for a reasonable cost of $2
to $3 million. IBM representatives have said “these
new techniques don’t work, but that’s completely at
odds with what remediation contractors are telling us,”
said Kacandes.
Mizerak responded that the success of these newer techniques
was “very site specific.” “For someone to toss around
those numbers without a pilot test is to play a guessing
game,” he said. He also questioned the cost cited by
Kacandes. “If an area is reasonably stable, nature is
working on it, and you’re preventing exposure, why put
a ton of money” into a cleanup, he asked, noting that
biological catalysts could be deployed to make the decomposition
of the chemicals happen more quickly.
Casper said in the past decade, the concentration of
the contaminants in the ground water plume had been
reduced dramatically. In 1996, a third of the area had
from 500 to 5,000 parts per billion (ppb) and “a very
small area” had over 5,000 ppb of the chemicals. (Five
ppb of the chemical is the standard for drinking water.)
By 2006, there were no areas measuring over 5,000 ppb.
Sixty percent of the area was in the 50 to 500 ppb range
and only “two very small spots” had over 500 ppb. The
contaminated water is being passed through a charcoal
filter, which strips out the chemicals, before being
discharged into the Esopus Creek.
In the meantime, Gallagher said her office is suggesting
to the owner of TechCity another tack for making the
property more marketable: take a couple of parcels of
vacant land that are not located over the plume and
do a generic environmental impact review with the town
of Ulster Planning Board. By getting Planning Board
approval, “the parcels would be ready for new building,”
she said.
The site is already outfitted with the necessary infrastructure,
so once approval was gained, developers “could build
tomorrow.” Developers would sign long-term leases rather
than purchase the property, to avoid incurring the risk
of liability connected with the environmental permit.
“We’ve been working with creating shovel-ready sites
on the site for some period of time,” Kacandes said.
“It’s a path we’re likely to pursue.”
“People need space that exactly fits their needs,” Gallagher
said. “This would be like going to a green space and
building without a hassle,” an advantage of the shovel-ready
sites in Greene County. “I can’t see the town of Ulster
turning way new ratables. This could be a win-win.”
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