Source: http://www.salemnews.com, February 23, 2016
By: Dustin Luca
SALEM — City officials attempted to assuage residents’ fears about exposure to pollutants if F.W. Webb starts digging up the contaminated Universal Steel site on Bridge Street for a new warehouse, but negative comments nevertheless continued to rain down on the plans Tuesday night.
The City Council held its third night of sessions dedicated to dissecting the F.W. Webb proposal for 297-305 and 311 Bridge St. The continuation of the hearing, which is two of five hearings scheduled on the project, was meant to declare the site surplus property for the city. That effectively means the city no longer has a use for the site and it can then be sold.
But just like earlier this month, the focus Tuesday zeroed in on contamination at the site and whether removing the current parking lot surface could unearth those issues for area residents.
The meeting opened with an effort from Mayor Kim Driscoll to address neighborhood concerns. That featured mainly a question-and-answer session with two officials from the Environmental Protection Agency’s New England bureau, who discussed the site’s history and what any proposed activity could mean for bringing contaminated material back to the surface.
“It was clear there were questions regarding the current conditions at the site and the process for redeveloping the site,” Driscoll said.
Doug Gutro, head of government and community relations at the EPA’s New England office, detailed specifics about the site remediation a few years ago.
He said the EPA spent $2.2 million and the state Department of Environmental Protection incurred another $748,000 to excavate and remove 8,990 tons of PCB-contaminated soil and debris from the site.
Metal debris weighing in at 33 tons total was also collected, segregated, cleaned up and recycled, according to Gutro. Regional PCB coordinator Kim Tisa also noted the work was part of the restoration of the site for its use as a short-term parking area by the city. This was a temporary parking solution while the new MBTA garage was under construction.
“The EPA was able to remove a lot of contamination at that site,” said Tisa. “Sitting on top, of course, is clean asphalt.”
Midway into the conversation, Councilor-at-Large Arthur Sargent pressed Tisa to weigh which of two options pose a greater problem.
“Where is there more of a risk,” Sargent asked. “Leaving it as is? Or developing it?”
Tisa replied that much of the foundation work involves driving approximately “500 stone columns’ into the ground.”
“You don’t have to excavate the soil,” she said. “The stuff is driven down through it, so you don’t have to go down an excavate like you would with a foundation wall.”
Beyond that, the top of the soil — between 1-1/2 and 3-1/2 feet — is clean since it was put there when the parking lot was built, according to Tisa.
“In this case, what we’re really dealing with is clean dust at the surface,” she said.
“You need monitors to work on it,” Sargent replied, referring to technology designed to monitor contamination going airborne. “You don’t need monitors every day to keep it as a parking lot.”
“The risk can be managed in a way that you’re really not seeing any health risks at the site during development, versus leaving it in place,” Tisa responded. “I want to monitor it anyway. I’m always one to do suspenders and belts.”
After the EPA officials returned to their seats, public comments against the project picked up where they left off weeks ago when the hearing first opened. All but one speaker railed against the project.
“For a number of years now, our neighborhood has been concerned about why we have so much illness and cancer,” said Federal Street resident Meg Twohey.
Twohey then provided a summary of households within 500 feet of the former factory site that had people “who suffered serious illness.”
She then read them off example by example, including diagnoses such as prostate cancer, melanoma and one “young mother, mid thirties with one toddler, diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, died several years later, leaving a 1- and 3-year old.”
“While this list of known illnesses in 18 people who lived within 500 feet of the site isn’t scientifically linked to the site, it is nonetheless compelling,” Twohey said, adding the residents won’t know the effects of the recent cleanup process “for a long time.”
“I hope you understand why we’re so concerned about health effects of the contamination,” she said, “and why it is so important to our neighborhood that we experience no future exposure.”
Essex Street resident David Williams then argued that in order to change the use of the site from a parking lot, “you have to have a very compelling, significant public interest.”
And that isn’t the case, he said, given the likelihood of increased demand for parking in the future in light of the renovation and redevelopment projects for the court buildings at the other end of Federal Street. He and other neighbors also argue that parking receipts at the Bridge Street lot would be close to tax revenue generated by F.W. Webb’s use of the site.
Botts Court resident Lou Sirianni echoed those comments.
“I’m advising the council and Mayor Driscoll that the right approach for the future is to keep the parking lot to facilitate future building development,” Sirianni said.
Cedar Street resident Polly Wilbert also highlighted how “the courts deserve significant parking for their purposes, since they’ve decided to remain in Salem, and we’ve asked them to go off-site during renovations.”

• To discontinue Beckford Way, also known as Beckford Street extension, as a public way;

• To sell a 1,260-square-foot portion of the site to Sun King LLC for $10,001; and

• To sell a 52,491-square-foot portion of one site and 2,015 square feet of another to Sun King LLC for $990,000.