Unusual toxic waste plan in Emeryville, Town hopes to lure more businesses
Toxic City Applies for US Grant
William Brand, Oakland Tribune
December 18, 1995

EMERYVILLE - One of the Bay Area's most amazing development stones in the 1990s is the transformation of Emeryville.

Once a square mile of rusting, industrial blight, the city has been turned into a power shopping center. Chiron, Sybase and other high-tech industries - coveted by cities around the nation -have lined up for a chance to expand and build in Emeryville.

Even Kaiser Pennanente chose to forsake Oakland for the chance to build on an old industrial site in once-grimy Emeryville. Emeryville City Council, which has shepherded this tiny town of 5,700 residents into the 1990s, is worried. Beneath all the new glitter and neon, in the city's tattered industrial heart, lies a potential toxic nightmare: the unfortunate residue of a century of almost unregulated industrial use.

So far, developers who have chosen Emeryville have the managers and lawyers to cope with the layers of government agencies that oversee pollution laws. They also have the deep pockets to bankroll the often costly toxic cleanup required, hauling away tons of contaminated soil, attempting to cleanse the ground water through elaborate pumping systems.

But what about the many smaller industrial parcels that dot Emeryville, when developers are courted by booming new cities in the untrammeled, green suburbs? Emeryville believes it has a solution: Do a soil and water toxic survey of the entire city, work out a site-by-site cleanup plan, then declare almost the entire city a toxic waste containment zone.

 It sounds diabolical. But such a zone would take advantage of emerging new federal and state efforts to ease environmental cleanup laws and help aging cities like Emeryville attract new development. The Clinton administration even has a name for it: "The Brownflelds Economic Development Initiative." Brownfields sites are abandoned, contrast to the business exodus to "greenflelds," pristine, undeveloped areas where builders don't have to worry about toxic liability.

If the waste can be contained on its present site and the source of contamination removed, the argument goes, then there is no need to go to the expense of pumping out contaminated water or digging holes and carting away vast amounts of contaminated dirt. The Brownflelds initiative also allows government to limit cleanup liability that prospective developers can face, an important consideration in an era when citizens tend to sue first, talk later.

The Regional Water Quality Control Board has approved a similar policy to lessen the standards for cleaning up ground water in very contaminated industrial sites. The state water board has held two hearings and will consider a similar policy early in 1996. So, with almost no notice, the Emeryville City Coma sitting as the city redevelopment agency, has applied for a $200,000 Environmental Protection Agency grant to complete a toxics survey of the city. The grant would be matched by $200,000 from the city's redevelopment agency.

The regional water board, the Alameda County Health Department  and the state Department of Toxic Substance Control have joined Emeryville in the application.

The containment zone idea has been used before, Emeryville City Manager John Flores says. But Emeryville's plan may be the first to attempt to apply it to an entire city.

The idea of easing environmental restrictions to encourage development on blighted urban property is very new. It's raising hackles next door in Berkeley. Some environmentalists are worried that Emeryville, in its haste to develop the city, might pave over serious environmental problems left by a century of industrial use problems that might eventually move through contaminated ground water to Berkeley, which borders Emeryville on the north, or to San Francisco Bay.

The Berkeley City Council, after watching a video ("On Berkeley Soil") made by two West Berkeley environmentalists (Erbele and Wood) on ground water contamination, voted unanimously for a report on the subject. “We wonder if it really is possible to contain pollutants on a site,” says Nabil Al Al-Hadithy, who heads Berkeley's toxins management division. "Toxic containment is an art, not a science."

Creating future problems?

Declaring containment could become a numbers game, with an area that appears safe on paper actually posing real hazards in the future, Al Hadithy said. Relaxed standards and containment may be controversial in Berkeley, but Emeryville calls the ideas "realism." "The truth is we have water contamination that can never be cleaned up. But the present law makes developers spend an incredible amount of money trying," says Emeryvilie Mayor Nom Davis.

"This really is an attempt to bring some rationality to the problem. There are layers and layers of government agencies that regulate toxins and all these regulations really have a very stifling effect on inner cities like Emeryville, Berkeley arid Oakland.

"Our little square-mile city has had 100 years of hard industrial use. If we are ever going to make it productive again, we've got to have an overall plan where everybody works together," she said.

'We know there are taxies in the ground and in the water," Davis continued. 'We know they must be contained or removed. But until now, the law required a developer to attempt to bring the water up to drinking water quality, for example."