As large industries began to contract and relocate to other cities in the s, they left behind properties with toxins that had to be cleaned up before other businesses could use them. Accelerated Clean-Up The city has accelerated this clean-up effort by obtaining state and federal grants to fund property remediation. The city uses grant funds to clean up land it owns and also makes environmental assessment and clean-up loans available to private property owners.
There is no minimum loan amount, and the maximum loan is subject to fund availability. Removal of the concrete slab will require about more truckloads, to be taken to a permitted recycling or disposal facility. The site will then be reevaluated to determine if there is more contaminated soil requiring excavation. Bay City News , News Partner. Posted Mon, Aug 12, at am PT. Find out what's happening in Albany with free, real-time updates from Patch. Let's go! Thank Reply Share. Kate Squire, a city economic development department employee, said she has tried for several years to convince "green" environmental industries to locate on old industrial sites in West Berkeley.
Squire said the law requires polluted groundwater to be cleaned to an almost pristine standard. But with current technology, that is impossible. So the state water board will only issue industrial developers conditional approval. Lenders worry that at some future time sites will face future and possibly expensive cleanup liability and as a result, many industrial property owners simply leave old sites vacant. The company doesn't want to avoid cleanup, he said, but neither does it want to spend the next decade tangled in a web of impossible regulations..
Navy, said there are sound reasons for the state's containment proposal. For one thing, cleanups are horrendously expensive. And the dangers of contaminated groundwater at industrial sites has been overstated. Urban runoff from the streets is a much greater threat, he said. Bay from runoff from streets," Friedman said.
On behalf of Emeryville Alan H. Adler, Berkeley Voice, April 11, Your article, "Berkeley eyes potential Emeryville pollution" is pseudo muckraking. It attempts to alarm your readers to a "problem," i.
Board about Emeryville's taking advantage of the Clinton administration's proactive policy. This reminds me of the corruption of the planning process that I read about 20 years ago in a book entitled Politics, Planning and the Public Interest, by Edward Banfleld.
I checked the facts and learned that Emeryville has a clean record in addressing pollution problems while the City of Berkeley, because it is wealthy enough to have its own health agency supported by higher taxes on its residents doesn't have to report its pollution from miles of leaking sewers on land owned by it.
Recently, Berkeley decided to hold a symposium about electric vehicles in which its flyer claimed that it had pioneered an electric car program at the Ashby BART. In fact, Berkeley has no such program; it is Emeryville which facilitated electric cars combo to and from it to the Ashby BART station.
Berkeley extols the virtues of a sister city in a foreign country, while choosing to attack its progressive next-door neighbor, Emeryvilic, which in the last 10 years has cleaned up toxic waste sites in areas adjacent to its low-income neighborhoods.
It is interesting to note that, if Berkeley were to hold itself to Mr. Wood's pristine standards with regard to cleaning up its own pollution by the widespread hauling of tons of soil and the pumping and treating of ground water, the city would go bankrupt. At a time when the city has its own planning problems with its libraries, civic center and avenues, it should not be spending its taxpayers' money making unsubstantiated accusations about the attempts of its neighbor city to solve a universal problem.
Why isn't the railroad linkage in Berkeley? Why doesn't Berkeley obtain a federal grant to at least carefully study polluted sites? Earlier this month, Berkeley's Planning Commission gave unanimous approval not to support containment zone policies in this city. The recommendation was founded on a number of commission objections to this pollution zones concept. Certainly, these toxic policies and their obvious incongruities with the West Berkeley Plan are of paramount concern.
Unfortunately, Berkeley's City Planning Department is now suggesting that council wait until all the economic development interests are explored. Planning staff suggests it could generate such a report sometime in late March or April, however incomplete. So, the question has become, "Why is it so important to take action immediately? Why now? There are numerous justifications for rejecting containment zone policies in Berkeley.
Rejection could be rationalized simply because of the West Berkeley Plan alone. However, there is a bigger issue here to understand. Perhaps the examination of the parallels to another political decision taken some 20 years ago will help reveal the imperative to act now.
The issue was apartheid. So what does apartheid have to do with containment zones? Surprisingly, these issues have much in common. No one will forget that Berkeley's anti-apartheid movement focused on racism. At a time when most of the country didn't understand apartheid policies, Berkeley stood up and said, "No! The moment would have been lost. The boycott was the right thing to do. Over two decades later, Berkeleyans now look back with pride on that timely council action.
Containment zones are about racism, too, but this racism has a strong environmental component.
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