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At Long Last, Raymark
After 11 years and $200 million, Stratford site gets a life
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Business New Haven
3/20/2000
By: George F. Garrity II
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From 1919 until 1989, Raymark Industries manufactured brake linings and other automotive parts at its plant in Stratford.
Hazardous waste produced at the site included lead-asbestos dust, metals and solvents. From 1919 until 1984, Raymark employed a system of lagoons to capture waste dust produced in its manufacturing process. Much of the dredged materials from the lagoons remained at the plant site.
Much of it was donated it to local residents to use for landfill. After nearly 20 years and $200 million, the former site - designated a Superfund location in 1995 by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) - has been purged of the dangerous soil.
But questions remain as to the ultimate success of the overall cleanup and who will ultimately bear the expense.
“Unlike a lot of remediation efforts that I have seen, this one involved the physical removal of much of the contaminated materials,” says Steve Kellogg of Stratford, senior vice president of Camp Dresser & McKee Inc., one of the ten top environmental companies in the U.S. “That is a very positive and definitive way to clean things up, as opposed to entombing it or encapsulating the waste. Once you have taken the stuff away, contamination isn't likely to reoccur.”
But Kellogg does have concerns about contaminated soil that has yet to be unearthed.
“How do we as Stratford residents know that they found all the places in town where this stuff was deposited?” Kellogg asks. “Stratford is a big town; they did find additional locations beyond the Raymark site and remediated them. But we don't know what materials were dumped in other locations that have not been discovered yet. This is a bigger concern to me than contamination at the Raymark site itself.”
In 1996 New England EPA Administrator John P. DeVillars promised homeowners with contaminated soil on their properties would not be responsible for cleanup costs associated with Raymark contamination.
But in 1998, Raymark filed lawsuits against 58 Stratford residents in an attempt to recover costs associated cleanup of the homeowners' property as a result of Raymark contamination. The court found in the residents' favor. Terms of the settlement called for homeowners to pay $1 each to the state and feds to obtain legal protection against Raymark. A Superfund statute holds that parties having settled with the government cannot be sued by third parties. Said DeVillars, “This puts the brakes on Raymark's attempt to finagle a way out of paying its cost of cleaning up haaazardous-waste contamination by suing homeowners.”
As to the whopping $200 million price tag for the cleanup, Kellogg says it was inevitable after the Superfund designation. “Being designated a Superfund site is a judgment call on the part of the EPA,” he says. “They review an inventory of candidate sites and decide which are the worst.
“The bottom line is by being designated a Superfund site it automatically became the object of additional scrutiny, precautions and safety concerns,” says Kellogg. “There is no question that being designated a Superfund site resulted in a significantly increasing the cleanup costs.”
In 1997 the EPA sued Raymark for past and future cleanup costs. The government claimed that Raymark was responsible for $81 million in cleanup costs it had already incurred, as well as future costs, which it estimated at $111 million.
The state of Connecticut also filed suit to recover $20 million it expected to spend as its share of the cleanup.
Raymark reacted much as it had with the homeowners. The feds claimed that Raymark had attempted to transfer its ownership of the contaminated facility to a trustee for Stratford Trust immediately after the company learned that a Superfund lien was to be placed on the property. Raymark claimed the Stratford Trust was established for the benefit of Raymark pensioners. That case is still pending.
Regardless of who ultimately pays for the cleanup, comparisons can be made with the cleanup eight miles down the road at the former Jenkins Valve Co., now the home of the Bridgeport Bluefish baseball stadium, known as the Ballpark at Harbor Yard.
Jenkins had similar hazardous waste-disposal practices as Raybestos, but the cleanup in preparation for the ballpark took only months, not years, and cost but a fraction of the Raymark cleanup.
“It appears to me that when there is a definitive, positive commercial use for a site it draws more attention to the issues,” says Kellogg. “When there is an immediate positive commercial use for the site, it has a tendency to get more attention and get resolved more expeditiously. The site is then no longer viewed as an eyesore but as a potential resource.”
Soon after the discovery of the contamination at the Raymark site the EPA, in conjunction with the state's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), began to remove the waste, demolish buildings that had become contaminated, and lay down a protective cap over the polluted area.
During the cleanup the EPA was approached by Leach Family Holdings, a Rhode Island developer, which sought to redevelop the site into a 300,000-square-foot retail shopping complex. After securing local approval, the EPA agreed to place steel pilings into the cap to support the weight of a mall. This was said to be the first instance where redevelopment plans were incorporated into the cleanup.
In November 1997, the EPA held a ceremony and an open house to celebrate completion of cleanup activities at the Raymark site. U.S. Sens. Christopher J. Dodd and Joseph I. Lieberman, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and DEP Commissioner Arthur J. Rocque attended the ceremonies.
Said EPA Administrator Villars: “Today's agreement is a critical step toward making Raymark the first Superfund site in the nation to be redeveloped for commercial purposes. The property will be cleaned up to protect the public and the environment. And Leach's redevelopment plans are likely to result in 600 construction jobs, 1,000 permanent new jobs and up to $1 million in local tax revenue to the town of Stratford each year.”
Naturally, Leach Family Holdings, which had by now invested a large (though undisclosed) sum in the project, assumed that it would automatically be chosen as developer of the site.
But it was not to be. At auction last month, the property was sold for $24 million to a consortium consisting of Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and Shaw's Supermarkets. The companies plan to build retail outlet stores at the once-contaminated site, to be completed in 2001.
Leaving Leach Family Holdings holding the bag.
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