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Saturday, May 25, 2013
Off track: Who’s going to pay for the cleanup of the railyards? [Opinion]
by R.V. Scheide, published on October 2, 2012 at 7:33 PM
Storyline: Economy and Politics
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When it comes to redevloping the downtown Sacramento railyard and cleaing up the former EPA Superfund Site, it’s beginning to seem like never the twain shall meet.
That’s one conclusion that can be drawn from last week’s Sacramento Bee story documenting the ongoing troubles at what may be the most toxic piece of real estate in California.
Still at issue, after nearly two decades of debate: Who’s going to pay for the cleanup, now and into the foreseeable future? And why do city officials continue to maintain the railyard is the best place to locate hundreds of new housing units, dozens of new shops and a state-of-the-art sports and entertainment arena?
Officials from Union Pacific, the former owner of the railyard, told the Bee that the railroad is the “responsible party” when it comes to cleanup of the site. To be fair, UP has done a considerable amount of work, digging up and transporting out of state more than 500,000 tons of contaminated topsoil. It also has installed a ring of pumps around the railyard that filter 400,000 gallons of groundwater per day from the contaminated aquifer beneath it. Those pumps will have to remain operating for decades, a testament to just how polluted the railyard remains.
Call it the legacy of western expansionism. It began in 1863 when Leland Stanford started building the western side of the transcontinental railroad at the foot of K Street. That set off an industrial boom the likes of which has not been seen in Sacramento since. As former railyard worker David Joslyn commented in his memoir, virtually anything you can imagine was made in Sac.
“Streetcars were built there, cable cars from San Francisco’s steep hills. Palatial private cars, dining cars, observation cars, day coaches … ferry boats, including boilers and machinery, river steamers, deep well pumps, turntables, bridges, both wood and steel, bolts, nuts, spikes, switches and switch stands, lamps and lanterns of every description ...”
Or call it the legacy of 150 years of sheer, unadulterated stupidity. All of the above items have their own toxic byproducts—arsenic, benzene, lead, tetrachloroethylene, diesel, gas, motor oil, acetone, polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, toluene, asbestos—all of which were dumped in giant open pits. Battery acid was poured into the ground well into the 1980s.
Union Pacific bought this toxic wasteland from Southern Pacific in 1996 and immediately tried to unload it. However, despite the remediation work it has done, UP has continually balked when it has been asked to do more by prospective buyers of the property and the state Department of Toxic Substances Control. Six years ago, Georgia-based developer Thomas Enterprises purchased the railyards after years of haggling with UP over cleanup issues. Thomas Enterprises defaulted on its loan in 2010, which transferred ownership—and the haggling—to Inland American, which had underwritten the loan.
I wrote a story for the Sacramento News & Review about the railyard cleanup in October, 2006. In part, the article was a response to Measures Q and R, proposed sales tax increases that would have raised more than $600 million in public funds over 15 years to build a new sports and entertainment facility in the downtown railyard. The people of Sacramento were wise that November, decisively vetoing both measures. They never have been too keen on publicly funding the Sacramento Kings.
Nevertheless, Sacramento city officials remain obsessed with redevolping the railyard. Earlier this year, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson and the City Council voted to trade city parking revenues for the next 50 years in order to fund a new sports arena at the railyard and entice the Sacramento Kings to stay in town.
When the deal fell apart, the Maloof family, owner of the Kings, offered to stay if Sacramento renovated Arco Arena. In my opinion, K.J. and crew should have taken the deal. Or offer to redevelop Cal Expo. Anything but the railyard.
That’s because I remain unconvinced that the environmental damage done at the downtown Sacramento railyard can be undone. It’s too extensive.
“We still have a need for a sports and entertainment facility in this community, regardless of what happens next month,” then Sacramento Assistant City Manager John Dangberg told me six years ago. At the time, efforts to redevelop the railyard had been ongoing for 12 years. I asked him why no one can estimate when the cleanup process will be complete and redevelopment can begin.
“The reason why you can’t answer that question is that it doesn’t happen all at the same time,” he said. “This is a 10-to-15-year development process.”
Make that 18 years and counting.
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It's also a problem that is hardly contained in the Railyards--despite the local myth that Sacramento was always a government town, we had plenty of heavy industry and plenty of resulting toxic piles, like the one being cleaned up right now along Front Street north of the California Auto Museum, formerly the site of an illumination gas plant and early steam-powered electric powerplant, and later PG&E's main gas storage facility in town. Making illumination gas (by heating coal and capturing the flammable gas it produced) was a process that makes 19th century locomotive manufacturing look positively tame in terms of toxic by-products. But there are crews out there right now cleaning it up! Farther north along the waterfront, plans are moving ahead to install a museum in a later PG&E powerplant--atop an encapsulated toxic site.
R Street was just as replete with industrial corridors and by-products--and right now there are crews cleaning up a toxic site at 19th and Q (formerly a Western Pacific wye and a few industrial sites), the future site of a city park that I still hope will be named Bobby Burns Park. Expensive? Yes. Complex? Yes. Impossible? No. And I doubt that the author or anyone else is going to stop eating at Shady Lady or Fox & Goose just because the area used to see the same sort of industrial processes that people are now making scary noises about in the Railyards. The toxic plume from the Railyards extends as far south as the Capitol--should we stop eating at downtown restaurants too, and toss out the idea of building more residential housing downtown? I suppose some suburbanites might feel a bit smug about this, until they realize that Roseville's railyard is still functioning (and still polluting) and right at the foot of charming Old Folsom is yet another former railroad shop site (built before Central Pacific broke ground!)
Doing difficult things that everyone assumed was impossible used to be a local specialty--as Leland Stanford, along with Crocker, Hopkins, Huntington, Crocker's older brother, and sixteen thousand or so Chinese workers proved 150 years ago, using hand tools and in the middle of the bloodiest war in American history. All it takes is a lot of perseverance--and, of course, access to federal funds. Fortunately, when it comes to toxic cleanup, there are some--which is why we're finally starting to see things happening on R Street. This is because if there's one thing that takes longer than toxic cleanup, it's bureaucracy. But the wheels are already turning, and the plans already made. Not for a mere "hundreds" of housing units as RV mentions in this article--but thousands, potentially over 10,000 housing units on the Railyards' 240 acres. We will need that housing for the Sacramento we hope to build, but obviously have to do the hard work needed to ensure that it will be a safe place to live.
The Western Pacific buildings were bulldozed before the toxic remediation or even the sale, and the Shops buildings are already cleaned--that's really what Thomas Enterprises spent the past few years doing, before they ran out of cash--stabilizing the buildings and getting rid of lead, asbestos and other contaminants. Cleaning up old buildings is a very well-understood science, and again, we already do a lot of that--like the Powerhouse science center, canneries and can factories (the "cannery" on Elvas in East Sac wasn't actually a cannery, it just made cans for other canneries to fill--the largest facility of its type in the country!) and the aforementioned Shady Lady.
The bigger problems are underground, but, again, a lot of it has already been cleaned up--and some of it, like groundwater contamination, is simply a matter of taking lots and lots of time to do things right. The problem here is not that the job hasn't been started, but that it hasn't been finished yet. Knocking things over sounds like an effective strategy to some, but it's counterproductive if the things you are knocking over aren't the problem, and if there are lower-impact ways to get the job done.
A little related: they wanted the 49ers Stadium to be at Hunters Point. Another industrial dump. Common theme?
And one other thing worth mentioning: I would disagree that the Railyards is the worst toxic industry site in the region. I'd say it is the Aerojet site in the southeastern county, much of which is slated for future suburban development...and if you think the railroad industry drops some toxic sludge on the ground, just take a look at some of the fun chemicals the rocketry industry uses!
The other aspect is that to an extent we must decide how we are going to use a property in order to decide how it needs to be cleaned up. So some amount of development planning is required.
Wow. How could it be that an efficient government can deliver a high level of public services without raising taxes sky high?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates
View this as any other investment that City could make. Yes it has substantial economic upside if development could start earlier. But it also has even more substantial downside risk if the site found to be even more toxic than current estimates. Sacramento could end up with a really expensive toxic turd on its hands. Remember nobody has ever published an estimate of the total cleanup cost, and cities are notoriously poor at land valuation even under ideal conditions.
Instead of putting taxpayer dollars into a high risk investment, it probably better to let Inland America, UP and state regulators continue poke along with the cleanup and sort this out a bit further.
On the fed funds front, the Fed could achieve this almost overnight, if they had the will to do so, by releasing funds either directly or through quant easing, not as yet another giveaway to the big banks, but TIED DIRECTLY to INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT and the JOBS that follow...
...which would be consistent with their enabling legislation, that most Fed boards have ignored throughout the organization's history....