Chollas Cleanup Still in Low Gear : Dump: Little has been done in the three years since the city promised to clean up the former landfill site.

Almost three years after city officials informed the Navy that Chollas Park land promised to the Navy for housing was tainted with lead, officials are still confounded about what to do.

City officials told the Navy in October, 1987, that 44 acres of land--offered to the Navy as part of a land swap--were contaminated by excessive amounts of lead from its days as an incinerator site.

Today, city officials are negotiating with state officials over the site, trying to wrangle an agreement about how much cleaning up needs to be done and which agency should oversee the work.

“We are slowly grinding through the grist mill--I wish progress was faster, but it isn’t,” said Robert Epler, assistant director of the city’s Waste Management Department.

The Navy, however, is not allowing the delay to hold up housing construction. Instead of building at Chollas Park, which is about 15 minutes from the 32nd Street Naval Station, 310 housing units will be built on a Navy-owned 41-acre parcel at Eucalyptus Hills in Lakeside next year, almost an hour northeast of the base, said Capt. William Scarborough, executive officer of the Naval Engineering Command’s Southwest division, which is responsible for the construction.

The land swap, first announced in August, 1986, after three years of negotiations, would give the city a park and a jail near Miramar Naval Air Station. In exchange, the Navy would receive the Chollas land for housing.

“Chollas will come through eventually,” Scarborough said, “but we aren’t waiting.”

Some residents who live near the land say they are angry about the delays.

“My feeling is that nothing is really getting done; I never hear anything getting completed,” said Don Day, president of the North Chollas Citizens Assn. “The city is interested in getting this land traded to the Navy--that is the impetus for a cleanup. It’s not that they want to get this cleaned up for the community, and that is real frustrating.”

Other residents, however, felt the relatively slow pace of the city indicates that a thorough job is being done.

“I really feel like we have started to go forward,” said Karen Jolaine Harris, the membership chairman for the Oak Park Community Council and a member of the Chollas Lake Park and Recreation Board.

Harris, who has lived in the area 35 years and runs a day-care program, said she is mostly concerned about protecting the neighborhood children. Inhaling and ingesting lead are considered dangerous to children because it has been linked to mental retardation. But city officials say the level found at Chollas poses no serious risk to neighbors.

To study and assess risks posed by lead found in the soil at Chollas Park, city officials have spent more than $340,000 so far. Depending on how the site is classified, the cleanup itself could cost another $1 million, Epler said. Or, at the worst, it could cost $18 million--if officials determine that the tainted land must be removed rather than encapsulated.

In September, the city will receive the results of a report meant to confirm the presence of lead that had been found by earlier tests and to spot-check for 110 other pollutants. And the site will not be classified until this report is released.

Officials are also grappling over which agency will oversee the cleanup of Chollas--a task usually handled by the state. Since the state does not consider the site one of its more dangerous ones, officials say they cannot get involved with overseeing a cleanup until the mid-1990s, and the city doesn’t want to wait that long, Epler said.

Instead, county health officials are now negotiating with the state to oversee the cleanup, said Gary R. Stephany, director of environmental health for the county’s Department of Health Services. And officials for the county and state’s Department of Health Services are now hammering out a memo of understanding between the two agencies.

Councilman John Hartley, whose district contains the site, said he was pleased that officials in charge of the cleanup have become more responsive to the concerns of the community.

“We had problems initially because the city was proceeding without input from the public,” said Hartley, who added that officials now regularly hold meetings to inform the public of progress in the cleanup.

Burning garbage used to be a fairly typical means of disposal. Officials, however, have since discovered that canned goods, which once had lead seams, leached the lead into the soil. The nation is covered with thousands of ash dump sites like Chollas. And officials are just beginning to grapple with the cleanups.

“It’s just a complex process that has not been gone through before, and there is no easy way of doing it,” Epler said.