MAHONING VALLEY Mayor likes new rule on sale of PCB-tainted land

One official said the rule change might encourage more voluntary testing.
By CYNTHIA VINARSKY
VINDICATOR BUSINESS WRITER
The way Struthers Mayor Dan Mamula sees it, anything that expedites redevelopment of the Valley's abandoned industrial sites is a good thing all around.
That's why Mamula favors a recent federal environmental rule change that will allow PCB-contaminated property to be sold before it's cleaned up.
The decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reverses a 25-year policy that required owners to clean the land before it changes hands.
PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, were used in hundreds of industrial and commercial applications before production ceased in 1977. They are considered a carcinogen by the EPA.
"This rule change recognizes that land is sitting around because no owner wants to spend the money cleaning it," said Mamula, a local leader in brownfield redevelopment.
"Venture capitalists will realize that they can get the land very cheap, use federal and state grants to help clean it up for reuse and actually make money."
He said the new PCB policy is just one more tool, combined with several other recently added incentives on the state and federal level, to facilitate redevelopment of older industrial areas without jeopardizing the environment.
Concerns about testing
Michael Keys, community development director for Warren, theorized that the rule change will be an added incentive for landowners to have their property tested for pollutants.
Ohio EPA has a Voluntary Action Program under which the agency will assess a site without holding the owner responsible for cleanup. Still, Keys said, landowners are gunshy of the testing because they fear that, in the end, they'll be forced to pay for remediation.
"I think the EPA realizes that we have a brownfield problem, and they have to be more flexible if we're going to get these properties reused," Keys said.
But how much will the PCB rule change help local brownfield development? Mamula and Keys agreed the impact locally will probably be minimal.
EPA officials said they could not readily produce a list of PCB -contaminated sites in the Mahoning Valley.
"We don't know where we have a PCB problem until we're working on a cleanup," explained Kendell Moore, a U.S. EPA spokesman with the agency's toxic substances control office in Chicago.
Mamula said he doesn't know of any PCB-contaminated brownfield sites in the region. He agreed with Moore's statement that specific pollutants usually aren't discovered until a cleanup has begun.
Campbell Works
Officials do not expect to find PCBs on a 46.5-acre former Youngstown Sheet and Tube Campbell Works site that Struthers plans to clean up with the help of state assessment and remediation grants. As part of a private-public partnership process, Astro Development in Struthers will develop the land after the cleanup.
The property housed a coke plant, Mamula said, and PCBs are not generally a byproduct of that type of facility. Officials won't know for sure, though, until ground-water and soil-boring tests are complete.
Bill DeCicco, executive director of the 120-acre CASTLO Industrial Park along the Mahoning River in Struthers, said he also doubts PCBs will be discovered there.
Kirstin Toth, a project director for the Great Lakes Environmental Finance Center in Cleveland, said the rule change affecting PCB is one more step in taking the stigma away from the sale of "so-called contaminated properties."
"It's just like any real estate transaction, but with an environmental twist," she said.
Great Lakes Environmental is housed at Cleveland State University and acts as a local government consultant on environmental matters.
vinarsky@vindy.com