World's largest clean brownfield debuts

by MIKE MARTIN, UPI Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON, May 2 (UPI) - Engineers and developers in Dallas are heralding the world's largest brownfield remediation as a smashing success and a model for the rest of the US, which is dotted with some 600,000 possible brownfield sites -- previously developed urban land now derelict and often contaminated.

"I have to say this has gone pretty well," said Rick Patterson, president of Dallas-based Hillwood Companies, the site developer. "The whole site had to be cleaned up and there have been no surprises." The 72 acre project -- dubbed the Victory Development -- is a joint effort between Ross Perot, Jr.'s Hillwood and Tom Hicks, a principal with finance company Hicks, Muse, Tate and Furst.

The project centerpiece will be the American Airlines Center, the future home of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and the Dallas Stars hockey team, opening July 28. "The master plan includes a complete urban development with office, retail, residential, and hotel space," Patterson explained. "It will all take about 10-15 years to complete."

"The thing that really drove this project was the Voluntary Cleanup Program in Texas," said Mike Covert, a principal with Dallas-based Terracon-HBC, one of Victory's lead environmental site engineers. "The new law releases the applicant -- in this case Hillwood -- and any other owners and lenders from future environmental liability," Covert told United Press International.

Covert said Hillwood and Perot actively seek private-public partnerships such as the one behind the Victory Development, which is co-owned by the City of Dallas. "The public voted to put up $125 million for the arena. Hillwood put up the other $200 million," Covert said.

"Hillwood also paid the majority of the cleanup costs, which I think ran to $10 million or so." Covert said before the Victory site was abandoned, it had been home to a Union Pacific rail yard; a power plant dating to 1890; a meat-packing plant; and the city's "garbage crematory". "It's been idle and contaminated for years now," Covert explained. "We found high levels of petroleum, lead, and benzo-a-pyrenes, which you typically find in cinder ash." Covert said he and Mark Edwards, from environmental engineering firm Halff Associates of Dallas, directed the removal of nearly 750,000 cubic yards of soil from the site.

"We had to take most of that to an environmental landfill," Covert said. "If you can imagine, a single dump truck is 6 cubic yards." "A lot of things made this a model project," Dallas regional EPA administrator Stan Hitt told UPI . "For one thing, the property owners worked very well with the consultants and the regulators, which isn't always the case."

Mike Frew, Victory project manager for the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, concurred. "The owners, the consultants, and people like myself in regulatory positions sat down, agreed on a work plan, and never ventured from that plan," Frew told UPI from Dallas. "I think everyone is satisfied with how this project turned out," Frew told UPI from Dallas. "It was certainly a model brownfield remediation from my perspective." Frew told UPI extra effort made the project successful. "The owners and their people were very pro-active. In one case, some areas of groundwater were contaminated. They just removed it all when they could have cleaned it and discharged it to the sewer. I've never had anyone do that before," Frew said.

The Victory team's emphasis on cleanup pleases Grant Cope, an environmental attorney with the Washington-based Public Interest Research Group, or PIRG. "The problem with many brownfield redevelopments is they forget about cleanup and plunge right into development," Cope told UPI. "What we too often see is an overemphasis on development and on-site containment, when getting all the contaminated material off the site and cleaning it is clearly the best way to proceed."

Cope said the state of Texas and the property owners need to add one more step to their cleanup program -- a centralized, publicly-accessible database that provides full descriptions of prior contamination, remediation, and so-called "institutional controls" mandating future site usage requirements.

"If you cleanup a site to a level that supports commercial development, you don't want to then tear down that development in 50 years and put up houses," Cope explained. "You need to have clear controls on how the site will be used pretty much forever. Any changes in that usage may necessitate further environmental cleanup."

Stan Hitt agreed. "The State of Texas does publicize contaminated and remediated sites on its natural resources websites," Hitt told UPI in a telephone interview. "Controls on site usage are in all documents that go to applicants, but it will behoove us to work more to get the information out to the public at large."

Mike Frew said Texas presently records cleanup data and institutional controls with property deeds. "If you do a title search, these records should show up," Frew said. "These new recording rules were instituted about a year ago, and at that time the decision was made not to do a central registry."

Better institutional controls are a must, Hitt said. "Texas' weakest link right now is in the area of institutional controls. We need to make sure these controls are maintained. The idea that one of these sites might be cleaned up to industrial standards and then become a day care years down the road is the worst of all worlds to me."