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Massena supervisor: GM remediation is on schedule

Posted 5/31/17

Environmental remediation work at the RACER Trust site on the eastern edge of the Town of Massena is on track for completion in 2018, which Massena Town Supervisor Joseph D. Gray said in a Wednesday …

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Massena supervisor: GM remediation is on schedule

Posted

Environmental remediation work at the RACER Trust site on the eastern edge of the Town of Massena is on track for completion in 2018, which Massena Town Supervisor Joseph D. Gray said in a Wednesday statement is “good news.”

The site is the former General Motors plant. Cleanup crews for years have been working to decontaminate the site. The automaker left large pools of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), which is carcinogenic, buried around the site.

In a recent meeting with RACER’s Bruce Rasher and Patricia Spitzley, trust officials updated Gray on the cleanup effort at the former General Motors plant location. Several decades ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency placed the location on the federal Superfund list of the worst contamination sites in the country.

“Nobody wants to be home to a Superfund site, but Massena is. RACER’s good news is the cleanup is on schedule for completion next year. When the work is done, the Trust can request EPA remove the site from the list and it will be totally cleared for redevelopment,” Gray said in a prepared statement. “While the trust has been marketing the site to potential developers of everything from retail outlets to industrial facilities, it goes without saying that promoting a location where remediation is not complete presents specific challenges.”

In 2014, RACER and EPA officials announced the site was 250 percent more contaminated than originally anticipated. They discovered hundreds of thousands of tons of soil contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), in concentrations has high as 500,000 parts per million - 50 percent pure PCB - in some areas. Federal regulations call for cleanup at 10 parts per million.

Once the cleanup is complete, the marketing challenge gets somewhat easier, the trust officials told Gray.

“In our conversation we likened it to having one hand tied behind the marketer’s back because cleanup completion and de-listing are still a target date. When each one of those two things is accomplished, they will be milestones toward redevelopment,” Gray said.

Two of the criteria RACER uses in evaluating proposed developments is job creation and benefit to the local tax base.

“First and foremost we need jobs for people living in Massena and the surrounding area. Every dollar earned by people with good jobs turns over multiple times in our community as those people buy goods and services, dine in local restaurants, go to movies, etc. This how we start to re-build our local economy and I trust the RACER site will one day be a significant part of that process.”

Meanwhile, the tens of millions of dollars currently going into the cleanup “have created jobs and supported local businesses that provide products, equipment and services needed during the remediation,” Gray said in the release.

The Town of Massena and St. Lawrence County jointly received a grant to develop a plan for a Brownfield Opportunity Area that includes the RACER site. That plan, to be completed in the near future, will explore a number of possibilities to incorporate the site into a larger development with a variety of uses possible.

More information about the cleanup is here.