Scott Swanson
Sweet Home residents’ participation in the clean-up of the former Willamette Industries/Weyerhaeuser mill site will be key to efforts to get help from the state and federal government in the project, health officials said last week.
In a meeting at the Community Center Wednesday evening, May 20, Rick Partipilo, manager of the county’s Environmental Health Program gave a group of interested local citizens a rundown on the status of the approximately 150-acre mill site located mostly north of the railroad tracks between 22nd Avenue and Clark Mill Road.
The property was foreclosed on Dec. 30, 2010 by the county after then-owner Western States Land Reliance Trust failed to pay $505,000 in back taxes it owed on 389 acres along the South Santiam River. The rest of the property, known as the Knife River site after a quarry that once operated on the land north of the Weyerhaeuser site, is in the process of being acquired by Sweet Home Economic Development Group.
The SHEDG Board of Directors, which also met Wednesday night, halted its meeting at the police station and showed up at the Community Center to hear Partipilo’s presentation, then resumed its meeting. Their presence boosted the size of the audience to about 30 people.
Partipilo is one of a thus-far five-member steering committee that is overseeing the clean-up effort on the mill site.
The committee also includes Oregon Health Authority staffers Karen Bishop, a public health educator, and Kari Christensen from the Public Health Brownfields Initiative division, along with Sweet Home Planning Commissioner Eva Jurney and Bridget Olson of the Willamette Neighborhood Housing Services.
In the Knife River property, arsenic, which occurs naturally in the area and was predominant around the former quarry, and petroleum that had leaked from tanks has been cleaned up, he said, with the exception of an area about 120 feet in diameter that was once the site of a petroleum tank.
“We’ve requested a ‘No Further Action’ from the DEQ,” Partipilo said. “We’ve cleaned the property to appropriate levels.”
The county received a $350,000 three-year grant last fall that will pay for assessing the environmental problems on the mill site, he said.
The assessment will include a historical review of hazardous substances used on the property, and soil and water tests for petroleum and other contaminants in areas once occupied by machine shops, fuel tanks and other sources of pollution.
Such contaminants in wood products brownfields often include pesticides, herbicides, lead, asbestos, pentacholorophenol, petroleum products, metals, and other volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds – chemicals that tend to evaporate at room temperature, such as formaldehyde and acetones.
“We’ll lift up slabs and check wells. We’ll look at ponds,” Partipilo said, adding that “on-the-ground” assessments will be performed by DEQ contractors.
The initial test results should be available by late summer or early fall, he said. Usually, those results will prompt further investigation and will help identify areas that may be lightly or not impacted at all, and others that will need more work.
Bishop said interpreting the results will take some time.
“Once we get the data, we’ll take a look at it and determine the health risks.”
The third aspect of the initial clean-up process will be community outreach, he said. Partipilo and the Public Health staffers emphasized that the more input they receive from community members, particularly neighbors of the mill site, the better.
Christensen said many projects that receive assessment grants, such as the mill site, will be awarded EPA clean-up funds.
She said “grassroots” feedback from the community and convening meetings such as the one held Wednesday are key to being “more competitive” for those federal grants.
“We want to engage the community, not just hold a meeting like this one,” Partipilo said. “We will ask the neighbors around the site, who are typically not part of the discussion, about their concerns.”
Input from the community will be critical in establishing priorities for clean-up and actually figuring out whether to try to clean the site up to residential – “a very high, safe standard” – or a more transitional use, for which clean-up requirements would not be “quite as stringent.” In the latter case, deeds to the property would carry restrictions on what it could be used for.
Laura LaRoque, city Planning Services manager, said both former WSLRT properties are currently zoned for recreation-related commercial use in the master plan originally created for them.
“The community could change some of that,” she said. “None of the Willamette property is in an industrial zone. If the community wanted industrial land, they could change (the zoning).”
Christensen pointed out that removal may not be the only option for contaminants on the property. She noted how the swimming pool complex in SunRiver is built on a military brownfield, and effectively seals in pollutants buried in the ground.
“You’d have to dig through the pool to reach the soil,” she said.
SHEDG board member Rob Poirier asked at what point access to the properties will be addressed.
LaRoque said an existing transportation plan addresses ingress and egress to the properties and the city is seeking a grant to update it.
Christensen emphasized that outreach to the community regarding the clean-up and use of the property should come from individuals in person-to-person interaction, rather than an “agency-driven” effort which, she said, is usually what happens.
LaRoque said after the meeting that the steering committee will begin meeting monthly, at a yet-to-be-determined time and place, and another “outreach meeting” will be held “two or three months out.”
Christenson said community residents need to determine what issues they have with the mill site, how development can address those issues and what corresponding health benefits might ensue, and how the change or results would be measured. That process, known as an Action Model, has been used successfully in other communities, she said, and government agencies that grant money for clean-up projects prefer that approach.
“We need to identify a couple of local neighbors to sit on the steering committee and ensure that our strategies are meaningful to people in the local area,” she said.