With its 2.5 million square feet of office, warehouse and manufacturing space, more than half of it empty, TechCity, the former IBM manufacturing facility located in the town of Ulster, is considered the most significant economic development site in Ulster County. However, a big stumbling block to redevelopment has been its designation as an Environmental Protection Agency-designated Superfund site, stemming from the spillage of toxic solvents into the groundwater decades ago. In the late 1980s the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a permit under the Resources Conservation and Recovery Act, which is administered by the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), to IBM to monitor, contain and ultimately clean up the site.
While only 43 acres contain significant levels of the pollutants, the entire 260-acre site is under the constraints of the permit. That makes it difficult for Alan Ginsberg, the owner of TechCity, to market and possibly sell off portions of the site to commercial developers. Upon purchasing the property from IBM in the 1990s, Ginsberg assumed unlimited liability, a burden that would be passed onto any subsequent owner of portions of the property.
To free up the unaffected areas of the property for redevelopment, last year Ginsberg, accompanied by local economic development leaders, elected officials and at least one environmentalist ”“ Ned Sullivan, executive director of Scenic Hudson ”“ began negotiations with the DEC about freeing up two parcels from the constraints of the permit. Collectively amounting to 30 acres, the properties are not within the 43 acres in which high levels of the chemicals have been detected and hence don”™t represent the same risk to a prospective developer. Â
But modifying the permit is a more complicated, time-consuming process than the owner hoped. “The presumption was that by the end of last year, we would have had the permit modification approved,” said Tom Kacandes, director of business development at TechCity. Instead, at this point the DEC is requiring more testing. “There”™s a discrepancy between (the testing that”™s) been done and what DEC thinks still needs to be done,” Kacandes said. “A dispute arose about validity of some of the data” from TechCity”™s testing, which seeks to establish the boundaries of the detectable pollutants.
“There”™s so little solvent here, literally you”™re at the edge of what the techniques can detect in a valid way,” Kacandes said. “Our concern is that the required testing is going to get expensive,” he said, noting that Ginsberg has spent “several hundreds of thousands of dollars in little over two years” on getting the samples. Â
“The DEC moves slower than we would like,” said March Gallagher, chairperson of the Ulster County Industrial Development Agency. “From an economic development perspective, we want to move it along.” However, she acknowledged the permit modification “is a new idea. The DEC wants to make sure nobody is exposed to anything bad,” a priority for the county as well, she said.
Gary Casper, a senior engineering geologist in the DEC”™s division of solid hazardous materials, said in order to remove the parcels from the permit, “we need institutional controls to make sure the remaining contaminants are not disturbed. We need to make sure we haven”™t missed anything.”
Casper said the testing samples by TechCity “did not indicate a problem” but “for technical reasons were unacceptable.” The DEC will be taking “split samples” of the new tests from TechCity so that it can simultaneously do its own tests. The two parcels also have different levels of the chemicals, which includes trichloroethylene, a probable carcinogenic that has been banned by the European Union and was widely used at U.S. military sites.  Â
One of the parcels ”“ it”™s the location of several mostly empty warehouse buildings ”“ has higher levels of solvents. The other, where the Bank of America building is located, has fewer solvents, but is also contaminated by PCBs, left from a former elevator system; those contaminants are not currently an issue but could be if the site were ever disturbed. Casper said part of the solution to releasing the two parcels from the permit would be to require both sites to be continually monitored.
According to Wayne Mizerak, project engineer in the DEC”™s division of environmental remediation for Region Three, the challenge is defining the edges of the plume of hazardous solvents, which are located in ground water 10 to 30 feet below the surface on the east side of Enterprise Drive. (The DEC officials said the plume is safely contained, partly through construction of a trench.) Mizerak said he expected all the data to be collected by the end of March “at the latest.”
Besides contamination of the ground water and soils, another issue is possible vaporization and migration of the chemicals in the building interiors. However, Casper said this is not a barrier to future development. “Especially with vacant and new buildings, it”™s easy to engineer a fix, simply by putting in a barrier and depressuring system. It”™s very effective.” For prospective developers, he acknowledged the levels of contamination aren”™t so much the problem as “the stigma” of being a designated superfund site.
Kacandes also takes issue with the slow method of cleanup currently deployed by IBM. “Going from a high concentration to a low concentration of chemicals has taken 30 years. But to get from a low concentration to non-detectable can take decades.”
He said that according to remediation contractors he”™s talked with, more aggressive techniques, which would involve pumping compressed air into the ground water, have been developed that could complete the clean up in a couple of years and for a reasonable cost of $2 to $3 million. IBM representatives have said “these new techniques don”™t work, but that”™s completely at odds with what remediation contractors are telling us,” said Kacandes. Â
Mizerak responded that the success of these newer techniques was “very site specific.” “For someone to toss around those numbers without a pilot test is to play a guessing game,” he said. He also questioned the cost cited by Kacandes. “If an area is reasonably stable, nature is working on it, and you”™re preventing exposure, why put a ton of money” into a cleanup, he asked, noting that biological catalysts could be deployed to make the decomposition of the chemicals happen more quickly.
Casper said in the past decade, the concentration of the contaminants in the ground water plume had been reduced dramatically. In 1996, a third of the area had from 500 to 5,000 parts per billion (ppb) and “a very small area” had over 5,000 ppb of the chemicals. (Five ppb of the chemical is the standard for drinking water.) By 2006, there were no areas measuring over 5,000 ppb. Sixty percent of the area was in the 50 to 500 ppb range and only “two very small spots” had over 500 ppb. The contaminated water is being passed through a charcoal filter, which strips out the chemicals, before being discharged into the Esopus Creek.
In the meantime, Gallagher said her office is suggesting to the owner of TechCity another tack for making the property more marketable: take a couple of parcels of vacant land that are not located over the plume and do a generic environmental impact review with the town of Ulster Planning Board. By getting Planning Board approval, “the parcels would be ready for new building,” she said.
The site is already outfitted with the necessary infrastructure, so once approval was gained, developers “could build tomorrow.” Developers would sign long-term leases rather than purchase the property, to avoid incurring the risk of liability connected with the environmental permit.
“We”™ve been working with creating shovel-ready sites on the site for some period of time,” Kacandes said. “It”™s a path we”™re likely to pursue.”
“People need space that exactly fits their needs,” Gallagher said. “This would be like going to a green space and building without a hassle,” an advantage of the shovel-ready sites in Greene County. “I can”™t see the town of Ulster turning way new ratables. This could be a win-win.”
