Source: San Diego Union-Tribune, June 18, 2016
Posted on: http://www.advisen.com
The city received $20 million Friday from Kinder Morgan, the fuel tank farm operator at Qualcomm Stadium, to settle a nine-year-old lawsuit over underground pollution at the 166-acre Mission Valley site.
Half the money is to go to the city’s Public Utilities Department, which owns much of the site affected by leaking oil from the 66-acre tank farm north and south of Friars Road, and the other half is to go the city general fund.
“I’m glad to put this behind us so we can move forward with future opportunities for Mission Valley,” said Mayor Kevin Faulconer in a statement.
Plans are being discussed to turn over all or part of the site to San Diego State University as a western campus if voters approve a new Chargers stadium downtown in November. But half the settlement costs could be used for any public utilities project in the city and the other half for any purpose citywide, the mayor’s office said.
“This is a big day for the city of San Diego and Kinder Morgan,” City Attorney Jan Goldsmith said. “The mayor and City Council’s approval of the settlement finally resolves this dispute after three decades.”
The Texas-based company said it has spent $75 million to clean up the site, which the Regional Water Quality Control Board deemed polluted in 1992. Kinder Morgan bought the 26-million-gallon tank farm six years later from Santa Fe Pacific Pipeline Partners and assumed cleanup responsibilities.
“We are pleased to resolve this matter and look forward to continuing to serve the citizens of San Diego and the state of California,” said the company’s general counsel, David R. DeVeau.
Kinder Morgan delivers most of the gasoline products used in the city and surrounding areas. Last month it took delivery of the Magnolia State oil tanker, built at the General Dynamics NASSCO shipyard in San Diego. It’s the second of five tankers that will be built here.
Former City Attorney Mike Aguirre sued Kinder Morgan in 2007 for about $250 million, claiming Kinder Morgan had not moved fast enough in its cleanup effort.
Petroleum products at the tank farm, in operation since 1962 and five years before the stadium opened, were leaking off the site into a mile-long underground plume. The city alleged the oil had polluted the aquifer that the city might need for drinking water in case other sources were disrupted.
Aguirre wanted “a complete and total restoration of this property to its original natural form.”
By 2011 the water board ruled that the contaminated soil had been cleaned up and in 2016 no further action was ruled necessary to clean up the groundwater.
Faulconer’s office could not immediately say how the $20 million would be used — whether the water department would spend its share on Mission Valley water lines and the city’s share on backlogs in stadium repairs or redevelopment of the stadium site.