Allan Appel Photo
Viewed from Mill Street, the geese don’t seem to mind what’s going on at English Station.
The Fair Haven Community Management Team (FHCMT) voted to write letters of concern to the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) and to United Illuminating about the $30 million cleanup of English Station.
Chris Ozyck.
Environmental activist Chris Ozyck made the impassioned plea for the letters, then obtained the unanimous positive vote, at the regular meeting this past Thursday night of the FHCMT at the Fair Haven Branch Library,
He said he was speaking not only on his personal behalf, as a citizen who happens to enjoy being on his boat on the river, but also on behalf of the New Haven Urban Design League’s desire to preserve the iconic English Station building, if possible.
The formal letters seeking environmental justice at the site are the first, but not the last, that management teams will be writing. Ozyck spoke of a brewing campaign of neighbors, officials, and nonprofits coming together around the clean-up of English Station, which, they allege, UI is doing in a manner that is incomplete and without full transparency.
The neighbors met with UI back in November. They were disappointed at the meeting to receive no detailed maps of PCB hot spots, and learn of no testing of the waters beyond the immediate site to inform those who fish and crab in the Mill River. Many neighbors were disturbed by what they considered UI’s less than candid update about the progress of the clean up, in the aftermath of the razing of the 1920s-era boiler building on Grand Avenue.
Lisa Milone and Peter Parady at the meeting.
While UI no longer owns the property, the company has committed a minimum of $30 million dedicated to remediation of the PCB-tainted site — thanks to a deal, known as a partial consent order or PCO, brokered by the state’s attorney general office as part of approval for the utility’s sale to the Spanish energy giant Iberdrola.
UI has a website devoted to English Station remediation. Yet it had not held an in-person public info session for a year and a half until a gathering in March of 2019 followed by the November event, which left neighbors like Ozyck with not the intended fewer concerns but more.
Ozyck acknowledged to his listeners at the Fair Haven Branch Library that by the terms of the partial consent order, UI is not legally bound to clean up the river, but only the ground areas of the site.
However, Ozyck asserted, Fair Haveners have genuine concerns. “We know people are fishing, crabbing, even swimming” in the waters of the Mill River near English Station, he said. And nobody is testing for PCB leakage in the river, he warned.
He asserted that UI, in its presentation as well as in the released data on the dedicated website, is not being forthright about the relationship between the PCB and other contaminant clean ongoing on the land and the condition of the water.
At the presentation UI officials repeatedly asserted they are responsible for dealing with the site within the bulkhead, Ball Island itself, not the waters of the surrounding Mill River.
FHCMT Corresponding Secretary David Weinreb and Co-Chair Diane Ecton.
That distinction remained a major point of concern throughout the two-hour-plus discussion in November. Ozyck said the community is now organizing to put pressure so that the water is tested and cleaned as well as the land.
“They need to put aside money to clean the river themselves or have others lean it. We’re at a point where the opportunity will close,” he said.
Local Fair Haven businessman and former FHCMT Chair David Steinhardt said, “UI has said we will not talk about this” clean-up.
That didn’t deter the gathered neighbors, nor their representatives who spoke following Ozyck’s pleas.
“I’d like to ask this body to write the letters,” said Fair Haven Alder Jose Crespo, which amounted to a formal motion. “And as a member of the [Board of Alders] Public Safety Committee, I’m going to look into my committee doing the same.”
It was decided that the executive board of the FHCMT would compose the letters, after soliciting some key language contributions from Ozyck, Urban Design League’s Anstress Farwell, and others already involved in the campaign.
Ozyck said the campaign’s next management team stop will be Wooster Square.
Wait a minute !!! Yet no one complains about the asphalt recycling center across the street that will turn that neighborhood in to almost worthless property values ???