Business & Tech

Prime Downtown Property Can't Be Developed

River Cleanup Needs to be Done First

Every once in a while, Mark Barnhart receives a phone call from an excited developer inquiring about the 6.25 acres of vacant land by the western edge of downtown Fairfield.

To a developer, the land must look like Fort Knox - flat, grassy, alongside the Post Road, near Interstate 95 and overlooking Mill River.

The developer asks Barnhart, director of the town's Office of Community & Economic Development, if the land can be built upon.

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Barnhart says he replies, "Well, do you have a few minutes?"

The property isn't able to be developed, but explaining why can take a while.

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The 6.25-acre parcel at 2190 Post Road used to be home to the Exide Battery plant, which manufactured automobile batteries from 1950 to 1981.

Exide Group Inc., which owns the property, demolished the old factory and carted off lead-contaminated soil a few years ago, but lead contamination in the adjacent Mill River remains.

The vacant 6.25 acres can't be developed because Exide Group Inc. needs the property as a staging area for construction equipment that will be used to dredge lead-contaminated sediment out of the river.

This morning, Barnhart gave the town's Economic Development Commission an update on the status of the state Department of Environmental Protection's order to Exide Group Inc. to clean up the river.

Barnhart said Exide Group Inc. wants the DEP to permit dredging outside of the November-to-March timeframe that the DEP believes would best protect anadromous fish, shellfish and winter flounder.

"Right now that's under review, whether that requirement will be waived by the DEP's Fisheries Division," Ralph A. Klass, director of environmental engineering at CCA, LLC in Brookfield, Exide's consultant, said this afternoon.

Another hurdle to getting the river dredged is the level of cleanup that is required, town officials said.

The DEP wants the river cleanup to leave lead concentrations that do not exceed 220 parts per million, while Exide Group Inc. wants the standard to be 400 parts per million.

Doug Zimmerman, a DEP supervisor, said this afternoon that 220 ppm is the standard approved by the DEP and remains the official standard. "Right now, we're going with 220. It's been settled," he said.

Klass, in a letter to Zimmerman on March 19, said Exide Group Inc. was reviewing whether it would formally request that the DEP revise the cleanup standard.

But even if Exide Group Inc. accepts the 220 ppm standard and is allowed to dredge year-round, which the DEP is considering, the project still couldn't get under way anytime soon.

Exide Group Inc. first needs to give the DEP a remedial action plan to dredge the river, which would require a public hearing and permit from the DEP.

The remedial action plan also might require a permit from the town Inland Wetlands Commission, depending on whether contamination in the ground that wasn't addressed during the soil cleanup is included. "I won't know until I see what the remedial action plan is," Zimmerman said.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also will be part of the process, Zimmerman said.

Klass said groundwater is still being monitored from the land cleanup that Exide Group did a few years ago and generally looked good. "We're still doing quarterly groundwater monitoring at the site. That will continue a while longer," Klass said. "It looks Ok. There's little glitches here and there. It was generally good."

A report from Klass to the DEP on March 19 says there were no PCBs in onsite groundwater, and lead was detected in only one monitoring well during the January/February quarterly sampling period. The report says total petroleum hydrocarbons (PHCs) continue to be detected in the northeast corner of the site.

Further complicating the potential river cleanup is chromium contamination attributed to Superior Plating Co., an adjacent business that, unlike the Exide Battery plant, is still in operation, town officials said.

The DEP has directed Superior Plating Co. to assess the extent of chromium contamination in the river before Exide begins its cleanup.

But past investigations by the DEP determined that much of the chromium contamination was "co-located" with Exide's lead contamination. The DEP was hopeful that most or all of the chromium contamination would be removed when Exide Group Inc. removes lead-contaminated sediment, according to Zimmerman.

But Superior Plating Co. would be responsible for removing chromium-contaminated river sediment that was outside the footprint of Exide Group Inc.'s lead- contaminated river sediment, Zimmerman noted.

Members of the Economic Development Commission said Exide Group Inc. doesn't want to be responsible for removing chromium-contaminated sediment in the river because it wasn't the result of the battery plant's operation.


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