KALAMAZOO (WKZO-AM) — The EPA has settled on their plan to clean up the Allied Paper Landfill site and it’s not the plan the community wanted, but it is the one that the city is willing to accept.
After years of debate, protests and negotiations, the announcement from the EPA was anticlimactic, arriving in a curt and vague news release on Friday, attached to about 800 pages of technical evaluation and official documents compiled by the Federal Agency.
In a nutshell, Alternative 2-D is the $65-million plan that will concentrate all the contaminated soil at the 43 acre site between Alcott and Cork Street, into a 23-acre pile isolated from Portage Creek.
The contaminated soil will be covered by a large plastic sheet, and several feet of clean topsoil, creating a hill on the site. The remaining 20 acres along the creek could be redeveloped into industrial or commercial uses.
It would still be too contaminated for residential use. There could be some recreational uses for the new hill that would be created.
For years the official position of the City of Kalamazoo and environmental groups was that the only acceptable alternative was to have all the soil carted off to a landfill in Wayne County.
It was a project that would take up to ten years to accomplish and cost three to four times as much as the alternatives the EPA was looking at, and four to five times more than they had available to spend.
Mayor Bobby Hopewell and a city team negotiated the compromise, which had not been among the plans the EPA had been considering. He says “we would have ended up just capping this thing, and not having any opportunities for something that might provide economic development or growth for our community.”
Over half a dozen options were pitched, meticulously researched and evaluated during the many years the landfill clean-up has been under consideration.
Alternative 2-D was the only practical one that allows for reuse of the land and would not leave a 43-acre fenced off no-man’s land on the city’s south side.
Most of the money for the clean-up will come from the money squeezed out of the paper companies that are responsible for making the mess.
This landfill clean-up is just a small part of the much larger Superfund project, which is attempting to clean the Kalamazoo Rivers and some of its tributaries from Comstock to Lake Michigan.
