Cleanups Fuel Debate: How Much Is Enough?

For ten years, Juanita Tate has worked to bring something so basic to a neighborhood that most take it for granted: a supermarket.

As director of the nonprofit Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles, Tate’s goal is to revive an area that was the center of unrest during the city’s 1992 riots by filling in a checkerboard of vacant lots and old factories with housing and soccer fields.

But Tate’s revitalization plans are repeatedly being held up by a problem common in urban areas throughout California: toxic chemicals lingering in the land, left behind by decades of industrial use. California has more brownfields, as the tainted sites are known, than any other state, and has been slower than most in cleaning them up. At the heart of the delays is a question that divides regulators, environmentalists and developers: How clean is clean enough?

The question often comes down to the equivalent of a few grains of sand -- toxic residue measured in parts per billion. Many of the chemicals California considers dangerous have only been scientifically proven to cause health problems in laboratory animals. But the state, ever careful to reduce the risk of harm, often requires contaminant levels to be reduced far below the threshold. For a builder trying to redevelop a large contaminated lot, parts per million can add up to millions of dollars in cleanup costs.

The shopping center that Concerned Citizens is building with a private developer at Slauson and Central avenues will not only feature the only supermarket for miles in an area starved for major grocery chains, but as Tate sees it, serve as a source of civic pride -- proof that a community stigmatized by the riots and the daily carnage recorded on the police blotter has the will to better itself.

“It’s not just a shopping center to us,” Tate said. “We’re going to bring goods and services to this community that have not been here before. We won’t be the poor old South Central everybody wants to talk about.”

However, the land the shopping center would be built on has been the site of a procession of polluting industries since the 1920s, including a plumbing shop and truck repair lot, and is crisscrossed by abandoned railroad tracks. Uncertainty over what contaminants might linger beneath the surface have complicated the construction process by driving up insurance and lending costs and leading to delays as a battery of environmental tests were performed on the site, according to city officials involved in the project.

California has anywhere from 90,000 to 120,000 parcels with known or suspected pollution -- from former gas stations and dry cleaners to old oil fields and glue factories -- according to accepted estimates from the state treasurer and real estate groups. Like Tate’s supermarket site, most are in older, poorer neighborhoods, where the profit margin on a successful redevelopment investment is often too small to cover the costs of an environmental cleanup without some form of government assistance.

Yet California is a decade behind most other states in formulating a comprehensive policy to treat contaminated properties and return them to productive use as new homes, parks and businesses. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who promised to help clean up brownfields during his successful campaign, is now facing pressure to begin crafting a solution.

“A lot of the Eastern states have been working for years to make it easier to clean up these sites. California has lagged behind,” said Gregory Trimarche, a Los Angeles environmental attorney who has co-written a book on brownfields. “As a result, California is widely seen as the most difficult place to do a brownfields project. It is certainly the most expensive.”

The financially strapped state lacks the cash to offer cities and developers incentives or loans to redevelop contaminated properties, a solution that all parties can agree on, and for the past five years, environmental groups and builders have clashed over another possible solution, a rewriting of the state’s toxic cleanup rules.

Finding a way to stimulate cleanups by the private sector is crucial, experts say, because it would probably take hundreds of millions of dollars to treat all of the brownfield sites in the state. For example, the cost of cleaning up the site where Concerned Citizens wants to build a shopping center is now estimated at $768,000, according to city officials, which is actually far less than they had first feared.

“If the lowball estimate of 90,000 [brownfields] is accurate, there could never be enough public funding to cover this issue,” said Rick Brausch of the California Environmental Protection Agency. “The goal has always been to leverage private investment.”

Building industry lobbyists, joined by lawmakers from urban areas with a disproportionate share of brownfields, argue that a slight weakening of the rules, such as limiting liability for investors who buy land they did not pollute, would serve the greater public good. Some of the changes would leave more pollution in the ground than the status quo, they concede, but would spark growth that would help turn needy areas around.

“It really is better to get a blighted property back into use, even if it is not the perfect cleanup. But that is not acceptable to people who view the environment in the abstract and do not consider the real world big picture,” said Jennifer Hernandez, a San Francisco developer’s attorney who has been aggressively advocating a softening of brownfield rules in Sacramento. “Some people think it is OK to hold a community hostage until some developer comes in and does full cleanup. What that does not take into account is that the developer may never come.”

Even Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, who as governor of California was one of the state’s first environmentally minded leaders, argues that the state’s toxic cleanup laws have become too cumbersome.

“You truly don’t want to poison anyone. You don’t want anything to be harmful to plants or animals or human beings, but if you look at the state superfund law and how it is applied, it is an extraordinary diversion of time and money,” Brown said.

Nonetheless, environmental organizations remain protective of the status quo, flatly rejecting the notion that economics should ever trump health and safety considerations. They cite the infamous Love Canal neighborhood built on a toxic dump in New York -- and in Los Angeles, the controversy over building the Belmont Learning Center high school on a former oil field -- as examples of what can go wrong when government fails to deal properly with the threats posed by past pollution.

“Essentially what we are talking about here is trading off human health for something else: economics. That’s really what this fight boils down to,” said Jane Williams, director of the environmental group California Communities Against Toxics. “The other side argues that 70% clean is better than nothing, if it gets properties redeveloped. Well, 70% clean is in fact not better than nothing -- 70% clean could hurt people.”

State regulators also voice caution, noting that California adopted stringent cleanup standards for a reason: Many toxic substances have been linked to health problems even in trace levels of exposure.

“Our concern first and foremost should always be a good cleanup. We don’t want to compromise on that,” said Dorothy Rice, the deputy director of the brownfield program at the state Department of Toxic Substances Control.

California officials limit the amount of pollution that can be left behind based on the danger of the chemical present and the future use of the land; standards are much tougher for a playground than an industrial park. But environmentalists point out that those uses change over time -- and government agencies sometimes forget what was left in the ground.

The consequences of California’s inability to reach consensus on brownfields is not only apparent in weed-covered lots and abandoned service stations in the heart of the state’s cities, experts say, but also on the fringes of suburbia, where the delays and unanticipated costs that come with redeveloping urban properties are fueling sprawl into farmland and rural open spaces.

“Frankly, if we don’t do a better job with brownfields, we’ll end up with cities that are hollowed out, full of blight, with infrastructure that is not used, while we spend more public money to build roads and sewers to new places, and pave over more sagebrush,” said Steve Andrews, the chief of strategic planning for the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency. He believes the state needs to provide incentives to clean and reuse properties in inner cities.

Former Gov. Gray Davis established a brownfield loan program in 2000, but quickly siphoned off funding during the energy crisis. Only six loans were ever made. By contrast, states such as Pennsylvania provide loans and tax credits.

California is also hobbled by a lack of published guidelines that developers can consult to learn how much contamination they can leave in the soil. It is one of only three states to lack such guidelines, according to the nonprofit California Institute for Land Recycling.

Adding to the confusion is the overlapping authority of California agencies, including the Department of Toxic Substances Control and the regional water quality control boards, which often disagree on cleanup requirements. State officials acknowledge that developers sometimes “forum shop” between them to see which will permit the least-expensive cleanup.

Environmental activists, meanwhile, point to problems at several brownfield projects around the state as evidence that public protections need to be stronger, not weaker. One problem case is unfolding in Gardena, where a developer built a shopping center and began to construct townhomes on what regulators deemed to be a safe site, then had to halt last year following the discovery of chemicals known to cause cancer in animals.

Cal-Coast Homes, which built a shopping center on West Artesia Boulevard, was finishing model homes for a residential project next door when tests found large amounts of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, throughout the site. Honeywell, Inc., which had operated a manufacturing plant on the land, is now under orders from the state to clean up the toxic mess. It maintains it did not know the developer planned to build housing. Local environmentalists say the state should have done more rigorous inspections before permitting the land to be redeveloped.

Civic groups such as Concerned Citizens of South Central, meanwhile, are caught in the middle. They would like to see urban properties redeveloped quickly, but also want to ensure cleanups are thorough.

Due to a combination of factors, including the potential presence of serious contamination, Slauson Central Shopping Center would not have been possible without more than $7 million in government assistance, most of it from the city. The development recently cleared a big hurdle by receiving City Council approval, including the public subsidy.

Still, obstacles remain. Redevelopment officials need to relocate a metal scrap yard and used car lot on the site, and they need to clean up metals and other hazardous substances -- which, as it turned out, were in smaller amounts than officials had first feared.

Ten years in the making, it will be a year or two more before the supermarket opens to the public.