Millions Flow To City For Building-Site Clean-Ups

Anyone have any updates on English Station? After the UI acquisition I thought there was supposed to be funds to have it removed or remediated but nothing appears to be happening.

Also, same question about the Winchester building.. the dilapidated half of the building that's attached to the Winchester Lofts? A while back NHI had an article that said this was going to get renovated. However I don't believe the most recent article about the Winchester area provided any updates to this part of the building(?).

Would love to see these two buildings renovated if possible, otherwise removed.

Must be nice to be connected in order to keep getting taxpayer subsidies so developers don't have to pay for their own clean up and prep of land and property they already bought and planned out. That's why the rich keep getting richer and taxpayers keep getting poorer - They're going to have to step up their game though if they're going to beat out Winstanley. He's the king of taxpayer largess. We're all the suckers.

This is the absolute smartest use of public funds and the state should be doing a whole lot more of it, especially in areas around New Haven where there is clearly overwhelming demand for housing. A few million dollars leverages hundreds of millions of dollars in private investment, including desperately-needed new apartments.

Another $100 million in state funds should be set aside to enable private developers to move forward immediately on adding housing to the 10 most promising brownfield sites in New Haven.

Aaron Goode, who sometimes comments on the NHI, has followed English Station closely. He recently said that the characterization of the site has largely been completed and abatement has begun. (Characterization identifies precisely what contaminants are on the site, in what quantity, and where.) I am pleased with this progress. But under the settlement between UI and the state, the site is being remediated to a commercial, rather than a residential, standard. I don't know how it can be economically redeveloped without a housing component. Given the residual level of contamination, it would be difficult to convert to a park. A solar farm would be permitted on the site, but I don't know whether that works economically.

Removing the power plant has its own complications. The plant sits on a concrete pad which
is several feet thick. The pad prevents access to the underlying soil, eliminating the need to clean or replace it. Tearing the plant down would be very expensive and leave future developers with a conundrum. Either they could leave the pad in place, which would sharply limit their design options. Or they could remove it, and pay the costs of dealing with the underlying soil.

OneCityDump, in most cases it is incredibly hard to identify who is legally responsible for cleaning up brownfields. (It is clear that ConnCorp did not contaminate the Dixwell site.) Which is why so few have been cleaned up without substantial government assistance. Until the late 20th century, all sorts of entities dumped all sorts of junk into the ground. Until the 1970s there were few if any record-keeping requirements. And many of the entities have long since gone out of existence.

Anonymous, there are many cheaper sites in town for housing development. For example, the large city-owned vacant lot just south of Career High School. And while there may be some contamination on the Olive Street lots near the Wooster Square developments, I doubt it is a brownfield.

One City Dump, the Dixwell Plaza is not a Superfund site. But I would be surprised if there weren't contaminating businesses, such as dry cleaners or gas stations, there in the past. The clean up of such contamination is much easier than former industrial sites or power plants. But it still costs money.

OneCityDump, not really. Even with due diligence, a buyer is unlikely to know a commercial property’s full environmental history. Dixwell’s non-indigenous history goes back a couple of centuries. And for a multi-parcel site such as this, identifying potentially responsible parties (entities who are legally responsible for the contamination) is particularly difficult.

Contaminated sites can endanger the health of nearby residents, who had nothing to do with the contamination. (If you think tort law is a sufficient remedy for this, please read A Civil Action and subsequent histories.) And they harm the environment. Either is sufficient reason for government involvement.

Markets do a bad job of dealing with contaminated sites - they involve too much uncertainty. That’s why so few have been remediated without government assistance, even though the contamination often goes back a century or more.

Opin1, thanks.

You’e right, it could be a prime piece of land. But redeveloping it is a huge challenge. I spoke with the mayor a few weeks ago, when he said he likes big challenges. He identified English Station and Church Street South as examples of such challenges.

Just to respond about English Station, UI has not held a public information meeting about the PCO-mandated ES remediation project for more than 3 years (long before covid), though the community has requested one on repeated occasions. However, anyone can read the monthly reports posted at: https://www.uinet.com/ourcompany/intheenvironment/english_station_remediation. There was quite a bit of activity on site there during the summer but it may have subsided somewhat for the winter -- the last report they have posted is for September 2022. Unfortunately much of the work, according to the status reports, is still confined to assessment and planning and not actual remediation of PCBs and other contaminants on the site. Overall the project is years behind schedule. If you sign up for the New Haven Environmental Justice Network google group (https://groups.google.com/g/nhejn), you will get periodic email updates about English Station and other EJ issues in New Haven.