(The following story by Mary Lynne Vellinga appeared on the Sacramento Bee website on February 27.)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The developer of the old railyard in Sacramento’s Curtis Park neighborhood said Tuesday the toxic contamination in its 72 acres is far more widespread than previously thought.
Paul Petrovich told the City Council he has spent $18 million to clean up the parcel since buying it from Union Pacific in 2003. And he’s nowhere near done.
Petrovich said his crews have sent 1,400 railroad cars filled with toxic dirt to a landfill in Utah, the amount called for in the original 1991 plan approved by the state to clean the property. But all that digging didn’t get rid of the contamination.
“We are doing testing right now to the tune of an extra $125,000 to determine how much more we need to clean, but our rough estimate is we’re only 60 to 65 percent of the way there,” Petrovich said in a phone interview.
The developer said he’s expecting an environmental insurance policy from Zurich Financial Services Group of Switzerland to pick up much of the remaining cost, but he’s not sure it will cover everything, or whether the firm will contest his claims.
Aside from the larger downtown railyard, which is also undergoing a cleanup, the Curtis Park railyard is one of the most significant redevelopment sites near the downtown core.
Petrovich said that coal dust brought in to help raise the railyard out of the floodplain turned out to be much more pervasive than either UP or state regulators had thought. “You can even see it in the soil where it changes from clean to dirty,” Petrovich said.
The coal dust, scraped from the inside of engine boilers, contains polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), classified as cancer-causing compounds.
Petrovich said he still expects the cleanup to be finished this summer, clearing the way for development.
Petrovich told council members that his appearance was to remind them of the hard financial realities of redeveloping a Superfund site. An environmental review of the project will be released within 90 days, he said, kicking off the city approval process. Petrovich hopes to receive city approvals by fall.
Petrovich said the project could “morph” in an effort to make it more cost-effective.
“I just want them to understand that there are added costs here and as the plan comes forward to keep that in mind,” Petrovich said. Unlike Thomas Enterprises, the developer of the downtown railyard, Petrovich is not looking for public subsidies.
Curtis Park residents have raised repeated objections to his development plan, which currently includes 210 single-family homes, 310 multi-family units, a mixed-use center with housing over shops, a park and about 150,000 square feet of retail.
The Sierra-Curtis Neighborhood Association has pressed for less retail, saying it doesn’t want the neighborhood to turn into a destination for suburban-style shopping. The neighborhood group even brought in architect Michael Corbett, known for his Village Homes in Davis, to design an alternative plan.
Dan Murphy, president of the neighborhood association, said Tuesday the group appreciates Petrovich’s effort to clean up the toxic site and seeks a dialogue that could result in a development that both makes financial sense and satisfies its concerns.
Unlike Petrovich, Thomas Enterprises hasn’t stumbled on any nasty underground surprises since taking ownership of the 240-acre downtown UP railyard in December, said Paul Carpenter of the state Department of Toxic Substances Control.
Legends of buried locomotives abound, but Carpenter said none has turned up.
On the contrary, he said, much of the fill dug up in recent months has turned out to be “beautiful sand” from the bottom of the nearby rivers. “There are big portions of the site that look like a beach,” he said.