Site comparisons | An industrial past does not condemn a property to an uncertain commercial future
CEO and president of Cordjia Capital Projects Group in Camden, licensed architect and professional engineer
As of press time, the Maine Board of Environmental Protection was preparing its decision on the final remediation plan for the former HoltraChem manufacturing site in Orrington. It could look at the Cianbro plant in Brewer just five miles up the Penobscot River where a collaborative approach to contaminated land reclamation has been hailed as a model for redeveloping contaminated sites.
While the Brewer site was cleaned up and put back to use within five years, the Orrington site has remained at the center of a prolonged cleanup debate for more than a decade and its potential redevelopment is likely another decade away. The irony is that of these two sites, the Orrington property has far greater potential to become one of the premier redevelopment sites in Maine.
What is holding Orrington back, apart from a final remediation of the site is contamination, is a persistent myth that once a site has been contaminated it cannot easily be recovered and reused. Not only is that false, but there are many examples in Maine alone where sites that contained PCBs, mercury, lead, arsenic and discarded petroleum products -- to name a few of the most frequent contaminants -- have been environmentally stabilized and then put back to good use.
Underlying this myth is the mistaken notion that no one would ever want to build on a site where there had been contamination, yet these same examples in Maine are also where very successful redevelopment projects sprang up once the site was sufficiently cleaned and the remaining contamination contained and monitored.
Our firm was hired by the company responsible for the cleanup, Mallinckrodt LLC, after the Maine Department of Environmental Protection ordered the removal of five site landfills and soils from the manufacturing area itself -- all told about 360,000 tons of material. Our task was to assess the potential for redevelopment of this site for light manufacturing, office space and even some residential use. We were also asked to analyze how the site would be reused if one or more of the landfills were left in place. In other words, would companies build on the site knowing its past history as a chlor-alkali plant (HoltraChem was a longtime producer of chemicals for the paper industry), where mercury and other materials were used and left on site in secure landfills?
Some of what we learned during our assessment:
- The vast majority of this town-owned, 235-acre parcel has never been developed. Only about 50 acres of the total land area were used for manufacturing or landfills;
- The site has most of the infrastructure a developer would need — with town water, abundant power supply (adjacent to a waste-to-energy plant) and access roads;
- Even under a modified cleanup that would leave four landfills on site, the percentage of available land lost for reuse would be minimal, while the removal of landfill #1 (nearest the river) would open up access to the river if the town wanted to develop public water access to the Penobscot;
- Even before the most recent recession hit Maine, the Bangor area lost more than 2,000 jobs in the manufacturing and wholesale trade sectors over the past decade. This site — along with others in the Bangor market — could add a significant number of those jobs back into the lagging labor market;
- Under a number of redevelopment scenarios, the town would recover the annual taxes it once collected from this site while the new on-site economic activity would generate spin-off economic activity to support those businesses and employees; and, finally
- Manufacturing and other businesses are accustomed to developing on remediated sites and often prefer those sites because the cost is generally less and the site’s history is fully known.
What we know from many years of development experience is that the process is always better if it springs from a collaborative public-private partnership. That process should begin now to resolve the cleanup conflict and then move forward into planning for the future reuse of a site that could well become a model for how Maine has recovered from its industrial past.
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