Source: http://jacksonville.com, September 14, 2015
By: Steve Patterson

Steps to clean up one of Jacksonville’s oldest industrial pollution sites are dragging while regulators weigh options and attorneys posture over who will pay the bill.

The next challenge comes this week, when a mediator will try to talk through some agreement for a federal lawsuit involving 10 separate parties to a fight about contaminants in coal tar left in the ground more than a century ago around Confederate Park in Springfield.
City officials have tried to be optimistic.
Mayor Lenny Curry’s chief of staff, Kerri Stewart, referred last month to “a likelihood that there could be a settlement proposed” during the meeting, scheduled for Tuesday at City Hall.
At issue in those talks is the city’s quest for a court ruling holding nearby property owners responsible for the cost of undoing pollution created as early as the 1870s, when a long-dismantled plant squeezed gas out of coal to power gas street lights and gas-dependent homes.
Handling chemicals that seeped into soil and water around the park might cost up to $17 million, a consultant’s report for the city said last year.
In 2012, the city sued Shoppes of Lakeside and Jacksonville Hospitality Holdings, companies that owned land around Main and Orange streets south of Hogans Creek, the waterway between downtown and Springfield at the south end of the park.
The city added a claim last fall against Continental Holdings Inc., a Wyoming company, the city said was a successor to the defunct Jacksonville Gas Company, which operated the Main Street manufactured gas plant.
Continental insisted it wasn’t liable, and in turn sued JEA, which operates utility easements in the polluted area, as well as five companies that Continental said had some responsibility for expenses it faced because of the pollution.
That made the city’s lawsuit a lot more complicated, so last week an attorney for the city asked a judge to split the case in two.
The city wants a decision first on whether Continental or any of the companies it’s suing is liable for pollution costs, then a trial on everything else being disputed.
Lawyers for everyone but Continental accepted that idea, William Pence, a private attorney from Orlando representing the city, told the judge.
While attorneys argued, scientists at Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection have been studying a plan Continental filed this summer.
That review has to be finished by Nov. 3, said Russell Simpson, a DEP spokesman.
But there’s no deadline for completing the actual cleanup, and uncertainty about that work is complicating hopes for making the creek and the park next to it neighborhood assets.
“We really can’t do anything until they get it cleaned up,” said Dawn Emerick, chief executive of Groundwork Jacksonville, a nonprofit formed to help revitalize the Springfield and Eastside areas around Hogans Creek and nearby Deer Creek.
Groundwork is pursuing other projects in the neighborhoods, but the park and the creek had been mentioned repeatedly in material sent last year to leaders of a national Groundwork organization to outline local aims.
A section of that report detailing possible funding sources for projects listed an $8 million “Continental Holdings Settlement” for potential use around the park. Emerick, who became Groundwork Jacksonville’s CEO after that report was written, said she didn’t know what that referred to.