City Council - Regular Meeting

All right, I'm going to test this out for the folks online. Can you hear me if you're online? If you're online and you can hear me, send a chat or raise your hand or something.

Yes, I can hear you online.

Oh, awesome. Thank you so much. All right. All right. We're going to get started. So we have everyone in the room today and we also have some folks online. And so I'm going to try to keep them as included as possible and not stray away from the mic. So we'll see how this goes. Hi, everyone. My name is Haley Michael. I work for Nortec. We've recently joined up with the city of Whittier on their Brownsville's program. If I get a little breathless, out of breath pregnant woman, it's because that's my current existence, especially when I get talking, which I'm about to, so that's why. um so we're going to uh talk about our brown the city's brownfields program tonight um we're gonna introduce the program itself uh for those who don't know anything about it and if you know a little about it um also stay tuned for our updates on it as well um so yeah go ahead oh Awesome. Thank you. Okay, so we really have the basic questions tonight, like who, what, when, where. But the most important part, obviously, is everyone here in this room, we want to do this for you. This is your community. And so we're really, really happy that you were able to make it and that you're joining us. This is a conversation, and you'll kind of see why as we go through, you know, everything that goes into this program and why it exists and why we are spending our time and effort and money in it. So we can go to the next one. And so there's a few different people involved. I might have Shelby introduce us formally since she's with the city, so thank you.

Hi, my name is Shelby Carlson. I'm the assistant city manager for the city of Whittier and the project coordinator for this project. As you know, this is about the Buckner Building. That's the star of the show, but it is not the only star in this show. Um, so who of it is us, the city of Whittier? We are, uh, we received a grant from the EPA in 2023. It's an $800,000 grant for the purposes of cleaning up. Well, let me back up assessing, cleaning up, um, dirty sites, dirty fields, which, uh, Nortec is going to get into more detail on what that means in a minute. And then Nortec is our, I like to call them our science nerds. They are, the proper term for them is a qualified environmental professional or QEP. They are highly qualified to do this work. We did a competitive procurement to select Nortec out of a pool of people who do this for a living. They are going to help us with the assessment, do all the technical work, help with the field lead. a hopeful demolition of the Buckner building, for example, they will be doing the quality control, essentially, of that project. And then, of course, we have our regulators. So we have our granting agency, the EPA. Thank you so much, EPA, for the money. And we also have the Department of Environmental Conservation for the state of Alaska. Oh, and I would be remiss if I did not mention that we also have a $5 million congressionally directed spending from Senator Murkowski. So huge props to Senator Murkowski. That is specifically dedicated for the Buckner building alone. So while the $800,000 is for more than one site, Buckner building being one of them, the $5 million is for the remediation of the Buckner building, which we are ecstatic about.

Thank you. All right. So we're going to just dive into it because we have some other things planned for everyone. And so I'm going to go over background information. And then we're going to go into more interactive part of this where you can be involved in this conversation. um the brownfields program is something they call brownfields and this might sound a little silly but basically a brownfield is in my head it's it's not a green field right it's a green field is somewhere that we want to build we want to um we want to take our kids and play where we want to walk our dogs maybe put a community center or park there and a brownfield is Something that there's something wrong with it to where it's it's keeping us from doing one of those things all of which are incredibly vital to our community and or to the community that the brownfield is in and so the EPA This is a federal program where they identify the brownfields and kind of give them their name, and then they figure out how to turn them back into a greenfield, basically. And all of this leads to it being able to be used by the community and not having any of those mars on it or contamination or property restrictions, whatever it may be.

You can go to the next one.

And so what the city has through this federal program, and also in coordination with the state, who has their own contaminated sites program that overlaps quite a bit, which you'll see later in this. And basically, this is the program that executes turning that contaminated sire, the brownfield, into something that's usable for the community. And that involves cleaning it up and executing a vision for reuse of the land. And one that has a lot of buy-in from the community and hopefully is something that is wanted by the community. That's the goal. Right now, we have three sites that we're looking at. And like Shelby said, the Buckner Building really is the star of the show. That's also the one that is obviously the most visible. You can see it from here. And it's just huge. It's massive. And there's an actual building on it. And so brownfields can look like a lot of different things. They can look like an old dilapidated building. They can look like a junkyard. And they can just look like a grassy field that you don't even realize that there's contamination there. And I think we kind of cross those with the other two sites, which are the South End Glacier Ave or the Whittier Falls property and then the community school, which has basically underground tanks or used to have underground tanks. And those are the three we have right now. And then we're going to talk about what we're going to do with those and what we might do with others in the community as well. So this is where I mentioned that overlaps with the state contaminated sites program. This map is actually from the state contaminated sites program. And what the city has done is they've taken some of these active sites and they've um, filtered them into their program to get funding for and, uh, get them cleaned up. But there are others that have not been included in the program yet. Um, not, actually not a ton, but there are a few other ones and, uh, there's actually, there's some that have already been cleaned up. Those are kind of on here as the yellow ones. And then there's some with, institutional controls, which means they're half closed. And usually there's a reason for that. There's no way to get to the, you know, if there's contamination there or something. So there's usually a reason that that couldn't fully be cleaned up. I'm going to hand it over to Shelby again.

Okay, so why does this matter? Why are we spending all of this time, all of this money, even if it isn't City of Whittier's money necessarily, why are we spending all of this on these projects? Well, I mean, I think everyone who's lived here for even a moment knows that the Buckner building is sad to look at, right? I mean, it's dilapidated. It's just been sitting there for decades, decades and decades. And Whittier doesn't have that much land to begin with. And having a dirty building sitting on a perfectly good piece of land is not necessarily the ideal use for that. And at this point, it's been determined that it's not savable. We can't, there's, you would need an unlimited amount of money in order to save the building. So it's not feasible. So what do we do then? Well, we have to figure out what's in it. What kind of dirty stuff are we talking about? Because in order to clean it up, we have to know what we're dealing with, right? So once we know what we're dealing with, then we make a plan. How are we going to deal with it? And then once we clean it up, then what are we going to do with it? What are we going to do with that space that the Buckner building is sitting on? So it matters because we're protecting the spaces that we have. access to, that we can actually use. We are reducing the uncertainty of what are we being exposed to every day. And because we're assessing to see what's the dirty stuff there. We are leveraging the funding because it is not City of Whittier taxpayer dollars that are doing the lion's share of the work here with these sites. It is... federal tax dollars that are mostly covering the cost of all of this cleanup, which directly benefits us. And we're supporting future use because as soon as we get that space cleaned up, that, the Whittier Falls Park area, even the tanks at the school, then the future uses can go on without having to battle with contaminants or worry about the impacts that that might have on the people who use those spaces.

That was a really good explanation of that. We have moved forward a little bit on this. We've been working with the city on this for a few months now. I actually think that they've done a couple of things really well. One of them actually is I was going to bring up. leveraging multiple different streams of funding in order to adjust these sites. Beyond that, just consolidating the entire community and looking at all the contaminated sites on an area-wide basis and consolidating that and trying to deal with everything with that far-out view. That is really helpful because it saves money in the long run. And you're able to address things in kind of a comprehensive way. You're not kind of piecemealing things that then they maybe leave off somewhere, and then they kind of don't get back to. And then you end up redoing work in the future. And so we've completed getting us on board, Nortec, to look at all of these sites, kind of give it that bird's eye view. We started looking at the Buckner building. That's kind of our priority right now of the three sites, I would say. So we've kind of delved into that. We've done data gap review analysis. And so we actually looked at everything that's been done there, because we don't want to redo something that's already been done. And we want to move towards getting Either, you know, whether the remedial action is take the building down or something else, we want to get to that point where we're making that decision. And we have everything that we need to make that decision. In the data gap review, I believe that's available online. And so there's a list of things that we wanted to look at for the building. We're generating a work plan. We're going to have to coordinate with EPA and make sure that we're checking all their boxes on the work planning and everything. But then once we can get that information, we're going to continue to move on to cleanup planning, permitting, and eventual reuse of that land. Okay, so we at some point in the few minutes, we're going to ask you all to kind of participate in this conversation a little bit, because like I said, we're looking at this as a community area wide thing. And while there have been three already identified, there are like others, and you may even know of something either on the list or off the list that you may be concerned about. And we want to We want to hear that from you. So after just in a few minutes, we're going to kind of look at this map over here that's in the room on the sidewall. And I'm going to encourage everyone to take a flyer that has all the summaries of the contaminated sites, the active ones that are in Whittier right now. See it yeah I mean so, but just to transition to that we're gonna have a little Q amp a session i'm sure that you all have questions and I would love to hear them so that was my that's my part, and if you do have a question we'll get you a MIC.

So I'm a bit surprised to hear about fuel tanks under the school. Are they military left? I mean, what are they?

Well, they're closed. One of them was taken out completely, and the other one was cement, filled with cement. So they're no longer holding fuel, but they are there. We haven't gone into super in-depth into the origination of them yet because, like I said, we've been looking at the Buckner building, but I do happen to know that they're both closed. And I also happen to know that there was contamination left from when they were in use and then when they went to close them, that got kind of left in place. There's still some.

And what are you looking at on the south end of Glacier Avenue?

That one is also, there was some initial investigation, some test pitting done. And when they did the labs on those, they found contamination. And so now it's been identified as there potentially being contamination in the soil. And they're currently doing additional work there to try and figure out the extent of it, because I think that's something that we don't know at this point.

The south end of Glacier Avenue is the upper end, and the rest of it is downhills, and this is subgrade contamination.

That's my understanding, yeah.

And so as we've experienced at the head of the bay with the fuel tank cleanup, the downhill transference of whatever contamination is there might be of concern.

yeah that's something that that would go when they go to investigate and delineate it um they would start to see that if that was occurring if it wasn't a lot of contamination it may be less and if it was it may be more um that will be basically if they're going to do more assessment they're going to start to look at if it's migrated and how far

And then one other question, that which has been identified is on city of Whittier municipal property. There's also state-owned property. Having lived in Whittier for a number of years, we hear about any number of skeletons that have been buried in the closet, unlike the tanks at the school. Is there any... Concern about the rail yard is my specific question.

I think I would see if you guys knew anything.

While we all know that we live in a railroad town and we had a past military base here, I think that there is always the ability of knowing that when you're looking around that there are contaminants pretty much anywhere, especially in towns like Whittier. The railroad could be directed by the state and even the federal government when they're doing their terminal master plan to have to do the same type of studies that we're doing.

If it has been identified, it still would be on this map. If the state was tracking it and it had been identified, they would be tracking it with all the other ones. It wouldn't be separated.

John Lundquist, Ph.D.: couple of comments here.

John Lundquist, Ph.D.: When I first came over to Whittier I think one of the things that I really wanted to focus on was the buckner building. John Lundquist, Ph.D.: And that was back in 2000 when I first became a resident here and, of course, I had looked at that quite a bit in the past. John Lundquist, Ph.D.: There were several people who got involved in that in several projects, of course, the Shannon and Wilson survey was done on the buckner building. And then we had the IRT, the Innovative Readiness Training Group, come out. They followed up on that. They did a pretty exhaustive research on the Buckner building. And of course, the conclusion there was that it's beyond saving. It just needs to come down. And of course, that opened the door to where do we get the funds to do that? There were three of us. I think one was the husband of the city manager at the time. We had another one who was a school teacher and myself. We got involved in that, established a little working group, and began looking at the Greenfield. At that time, the city was focused, and I think Peter remembers this too, on the Greenfield Fund. We were told that the Brownfield Fund was more for the railroad fund. We're going to try to work with the railroad together to access both of these kitties and get something done. At any rate, it's very encouraging to hear that this is moving forward again. But I think one of the frustrations on the part of a longtime Whittier resident here is these hibernation periods where there's a lot of focus on the Buckner building and then it kind of gets back into the hibernation mode and then it kind of pops up again and then it goes back in the hibernation mode. So I guess from my vantage point, I'll believe it when I see it and I wish you all the luck in the world and I'll be right there trying to help in whatever way I can. But as part of this, Uh, the, the, the upshot was in, in the survey by the innovative readiness training group. Uh, how do we do this? This working group that I mentioned. Looked at the EPA we contacted the Pacific Northwest division there and, of course, the EPA now is being. unfunded and people are being fired right and left so i'm not sure that's going to be a viable alternative, but we also looked at the Department of Health and social services. Because of the asbestos and the lead and and some of the other contaminants there in the building. which also are issues in some of the other areas here. We also thought about contacting just some private foundations, that that might be a way of generating some funds. The Prince William Sound Economic Development District was another vehicle that we thought about accessing. So it's very encouraging to hear that we now have $5 million as a congressional appropriation for this or congressional earmark. But I do remember very large sums of money needed to, one, abate the problems, the environmental problems, and number two, to actually take the building down. And of course, the caveat there was the longer we wait, the more dangerous it's going to be to get into that building to do anything. There's Friable asbestos, I'm sure that most of it is probably fried out of there, blown out of there, but I'm sure there's still plenty left. So I guess there's a sense of urgency on my part, and I would really hope that this doesn't go into hibernation again. It's encouraging to see people here attending and trying to push the thing forward. So whatever we can do, I sure encourage that. Thank you.

Yeah, I always want to keep the momentum, so when you have it, it slips away. So thank you very much for that comment.

When you say contamination, what does that mean? Is it usually fuel? Is that what we're talking about, old fuel? At the Buckner building? Anywhere? Contamination is?

A lot of it is fuel. a lot of it really is fuel, but there are other things too. Um, the, uh, At the Buckner building, there was a lot of activities that happened in that building and old power generation equipment in that building. And so what those two things basically mean is there was things like lead rifle ranges, where they used lead shot. Or they used old equipment that had hydraulic oil with PCBs in it, because that was very common. And there was a room with dry cleaning operation in there. And we haven't actually identified anything specific with that because we need to get under the building. But those sorts of things, that actually represents a pretty wide array of contamination from metals to chlorinated to fuel.

Have you done any testing on the waters?

I believe there's groundwater testing at the Buckner building. That'll be kind of some of that environmental contamination on the exterior and that would include the groundwater. We are actually recommending at this point to look at it after the building is down so that we can get a better view of what's going on underneath that building.

What all was tested? Is it mostly just... Like fuels?

Mostly, yeah.

Did you test for any contaminated black water or anything like that?

Like septic? I don't believe so.

Does the city of Whittier have a dump site for RVs? No. That might go on the list for the next I I know the buckner building and all the fuels are very, very important, but I know they're being addressed and it'll just be a matter of years before they're cleaned up, but what you have when you're left. Are a few things that could be fixed now for not very much money. And stop contamination. Like with an RV dump. Have they has DC tested over the Campgrounds And

I don't know that ADEC does that sort of testing just without a site being identified as contaminated. However, there is an RV dump slated on our capital improvement plan. So we do have plans to create an RV dump. I'd have to reference the capital improvement plan again. 2027. So we're thinking next year is when we plan to construct it. Yeah.

You raised prices on your RVs staying overnight. No, that's all right. I just wanted to bring that up. Thank you.

Yeah. Hi, my name is Sebastian. I'm the city's federal lobbyist. And I wanted to address a couple of issues. This gentleman raised because I've been working for the city for a long time. And, you know, my involvement is, the Buckner building goes back to Mark Lynch. And I remember actually touring the building through its entirety when it was still legal to do so. So there were a couple of things at that time. We brought up one of the EPA Brownfields officials to take a look at it. And she suggested getting an assessment done like a preliminary assessment, and DEC did do an assessment, a follow-on assessment with that. But we were not able to get any federal funding for a period of time. We did take a good hard run at trying to get the building qualified under the Army Corps Formerly Utilized Defense Sites Program, the FUDS program. And they were very insistent that because the building was turned over to the city in good working and operating shape, therefore it didn't qualify in the degradation. was a result of a lack of maintenance. And I'm not going to go through, I don't even know all the history of the changes in ownership and the various and sundry plans that were considered and never followed through. Now, that's very different than the tank farm, which is clearly identified as an Army facility that was degraded, and they needed to clean that up before there could be a transfer to the city. So we were in this period of time where, at that point, Congress had had a moratorium on congressionally directed spending. back then it was called earmarks today it's called congressionally directed spending but the the issue never went away and it was always on the city's agenda and i was always sort of keeping an eye out for you know when and where there could be an opportunity and so two things happened. The Brownfields program took some pretty significant cuts in the 00s and in the 10s. It was really a creation during the 1990s. And it was really just kind of an assessment program for many, many years. And then the infrastructure or bipartisan infrastructure law injected significant funding into the Brownfields program. That was step one that was helpful. The other thing was Congress brought back congressionally directed spending and Senator Murkowski, chair of the Senate Environment and Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, which oversees the EPA. So we took a run at trying to get some congressionally directed spending concurrently with an application by the city, competitive grant application by the city to the EPA Brownfields program. So it was a win on two fronts. Now we are in the process of these next stages. And yes, the big one is going to be you know remediating and taking the take once all the assessments and analysis is done planning all that good stuff is going to be taking remediating the building and starting to take it down so we we will need to take another um you know crack at getting some more congressionally directed spending i think we have a good chance at it um but we have to make some progress on the money That's already been provided and to show that we're able to execute and carry out what's been provided to the city so far. So that's, I was actually going to talk about this in my talk, but maybe people coming up and I'll have to go through all of this again. That's the explanation of my knowledge and involvement of the project. So thank you.

Thank you.

If I can add just one thing, talking about how the different layers and Dave, when you were talking about the different studies that had happened and how they fluctuated and the amount of dollars to remove the materials. And back then, there was not as much technology as there is now. And so with the Buckner building, these ladies know that one of our thoughts is why we received an $800,000 Brownsville, that once we have the studies and the partial start to demo the building, we can apply for a super fund. And that super fund, while that just sounds like, whoa, how does a town of 273 people do it? they really like these projects that they can do one big thing really great. And we are a low hanging fruit in the dollar amount to be able to do that. And so that's how your administration is moving forward on, you know, on a weekly and monthly basis of getting this process complete and at the same time working towards how we get The other part is that large number that the city had always heard of was because at that time they thought that they would have to mitigate and then remove the concrete and put it on barges and take it out of here. There's now a system that can clean the concrete. We can use the concrete once it's clean for other projects. And so then you're only trying to ship out the contaminants. So those are things that, you know, on the backside, while it was back then, you're absolutely right. It was this really astronomical number. I'm not saying that it's not going to be that, but there are other processes with it.

Um, so with, um, the, uh, The QR codes up here, we have all the Whittier contaminated sites. There's an email list for Brownfields program updates. Please get on it. It'll be awesome. We'll be putting out everything to Shelby that hopefully everyone can look at. And then we also have a project web page where everything will be posted as well. And then please email, again, this is, we would really like your input about potential other sites we could be looking at. And while we, you know, while we have this momentum, while we have this, you know, this funding, we'd like to hear from you. And if you'd like, the next one is, okay. So if you here, we have some sticky notes up here. If you have any commentary or notes about this map on the wall over here and the sites that are on it or sites that are not on it, we invite you to come take a look at it, make a note. put a note up there with your name or not with your name um is that okay okay anonymous um so uh and is there anything else we wanted to say about that one

I just add, so we have identified the three priority sites that we thought were really important. But now we're looking to you to say, what else are we missing? What other sites are probably maybe dirty that might maybe they maybe we're not sure if they're dirty and they just need assessment. Maybe we know they're dirty and we'd like to prioritize that as a place that we get cleaned up so that we can reuse it. So that's what this exercise is all about is we've got our three, but we're open to at least two more. So if you have ideas, we would really like to hear them. So that way we can start investigating those and add them to our list. We... You're welcome to help us with this exercise right now. We'll be here to chat with for the next 15 minutes before the regular meeting starts. Or you can send us an email if you think of something later. We're open anytime. It's a year from now when you think of it. Please email us and we will add it to our list.

I think I'd also throw in there reuse as well. That's going to be, we're going to continue to look for input from the community on what you would like to see in your community and how these sites could be used to that benefit.

I do have one more comment. I see that the school is on there. And that brings up in my mind this tunnel that goes from Begich Towers over to the school. It's one of those properties that nobody really wants to claim. Begich Towers doesn't want to claim it. The school doesn't claim it. But that has been in existence for decades. And I would almost bet that there's some challenges there as far as environmental pollution and hazardous materials. If that can be included in the school program itself, I just make the assumption that this is kind of an extension onto the school. As I say, I'm not sure anybody wants to claim ownership to it, but it probably needs to be looked at too. Thank you.

Excellent. Our first sticky note. Thank you. And there's more food and snacks in the back, so stick around, look at the map, come up and ask us questions, Nortec or the city. Yeah, if you want to just kind of look over what the sites are that we have on there, because you're like, I don't know what this is, what's going on here. We have it on a flyer up here at the front.