Allan Appel Photo
The approved sites are directly north of the entryway at East and Ives in the picture; the proposed new piles of dry materials would be half as high as these salt piles.
Piles of steel, rebar, and other heavy industrial materials are about to grow higher along the banks of the Mill River, despite fears of neighbors about what’s in the dust that gets kicked up in the process.
That approval was granted — and those fears were details — during a lengthy meeting Wednesday night of the City Plan Commission.
The location in question is a collection of three outdoor storage parcels within the site of the former Simkins Industries recycling property at 259 East St. along the Mill River opposite the Water Pollution Control Authority building at the border of the Wooster Square and Fair Haven neighborhoods.
That’s the long rectangular location along East Street running up from Chapel Street toward Grand Avenue cheek by jowl to the picturesque pyramids of salt and sand the city uses to treat the roads during snowstorms
There Petroleum Terminals has been renting space storing coils, re-bar, and steel products delivered on trains from the port to this heavy industrial zone where the materials are transferred to trucks that take the loads to construction sites around the state.
All this is perfectly legal use in this heavy industrial zone.
Petroleum Terminals came before the City Plan Commission to request three separate special permits required to significantly increase the size or square footage of the piles at each of the three sites from the allowable-by-right 500 square feet.
The commission approved the request, with conditions, after hearing from neighbors about their environmental fears.
Fair Haven Alders Santiago and Crespo.
The increased industrial use has led community members to meet with Petroleum Terminal and its attorney, Fair Haven lawyer Marjorie Shansky, over the last several months. They expressed concerns about the larger visual piles, the potential kicking of contaminants from a site that might be a brownfield and worry about leeching into the Mill River.
Fair Haven Alders Jose Crespo and Ernie Santiago showed up at Wednesday night’s hearing to express opposition to the permits and to read a formal letter in opposition signed by them along with fellow Fair Haven Alder Santiago Berrios-Bones, Wooster Square Alder Aaron Greenberg, East Rock’s Jessica Holmes, and the leadership of the Fair Haven Community Management Team.
The letter asked for the issue to be tabled until environmental site assessments could be reviewed. Another letter read into the record expressed support from the Grand Avenue Special Services District’s Frank Alvarado.
Shanksy pointed out that her client rents, doesn’t own, the former Simkins site . She called her client a good steward of the property, periodically washing the gravel areas used for off-loading.
No one on the City Plan staff present at Wednesday night’s meeting knew the whereabouts of the documents in question that might throw light on whether the site is contaminated and whether increase weight and piles of material might lead to a disturbance of “toxic dust.”
After passionate discussion of their fears by community representatives, commission Chairman Ed Mattison said, “My problem with the argument from neighbors is that it’s not clear to me we have the legal right to do this”— that is, to to make scientific judgements on whether some dust is dangerous and other dust not.
“All of us are empathetic, but that doesn’t mean we’re authorized to give you what you want,” he told the opponents.
Mattison and fellow Commissioner Adam Marchand (who’s also a Westville alder) urged the Fair Haven alders and neighbors perhaps to go to the state Department of Engergy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) to seek the site assessment and environmental impact documents.
“Yes it could be a brownfield considering our city’s industrial history,” Marchand saidm but he tried to provide some comfort by adding, ironically, that he doubts if “it’s DDT-soaked dirt on truck wheels.”
Whatever the dust is made of, Marchand drilled down with Ronald E. Bomengen, a project engineer from Fuss & O’Neill who was with Shanksy advising on the proposal. Marchand asked if the additional weight of higher and wider piles of aggregate and other materials could release potential contaminants or puncture what might be an encapsulated layer below.
The answer in both cases is no, said Bomengen. He added that Petroleum Terminals has a permit with DEEP that requires them to test the small portion of runoff, not contained within the site, that does reach the Mill River.
Commisioners Mattison and Marchand listen.
As the commissioners speculated, Shansky reminded them several times that Petroleum Terminals is a short-term tenant with no overarching requirement for testing. She called the remarks of the alders and the community about dangers and potential toxicity of escaping dust “tremendously speculative” and “without countervailing evidence.”
She said the sites are part of a valuable freight transfer network in the multi-modal economy of the state and vital to the deep water port of New Haven. “It’s a perfectly harmonious use, eminently of right,” she said of the permit requests.
In the end the commissioners voted unanimously to approve all six special permits and all six site plans, but with a collective amendment offered by Marchand, City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, and Mattison. They added to the approval a condition that a “robust dust” control plan be implemented, that the dust removal and control be executed on site, before the trucks roll out of the area onto the streets, and that the city’s engineers and public works officials sign off on the plan, in writing.
“Robust is us,” quipped Shanksy.
New Haven Urban Design League President Anstress Farwell, another opponent of the plan, was philosophical after the vote: “For all of the pushing we did, there are some improvements.”
She also said the thoroughness of the discussion, led by Mattison, showed flaws in the regulatory process — the limitation of the commissioners, for example, to address the environmental issues of such huge increases in outdoor storage of materials, and “gaps in the protection of the public.”
She called for a review of the ordinance pertaining to outdoor storage that allows growth from, in one of the three sites, for example, from 500 square feet of storage to 77,400 square feet.
“Size matters,” Farwell said.
Other conditions include that the piles be of all dry materials, that they do not exceed 20 feet above the street levels, and no processing of the materials take place at the sites.
Yet another example of the REGIONAL reliance on New Haven land and people. We pay the price, you reap the rewards.