Housatonic — The General Electric Company (GE) may run into a brick wall of local regulations in their quest to save $250 million by dumping toxic waste at three proposed sites in south Berkshire County as part of an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-mandated cleanup of the Housatonic River.
A GE-owned parcel at Rising Pond here — earmarked by the company for a PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl) dump –is zoned for residential use only, according to Great Barrington Town Planner Christopher Rembold, who said the town’s zoning regulations “do not allow an industrial-type use” at that location. The town’s zoning map confirms this.
The company’s Pittsfield plant for years polluted the river and the neighborhoods around it, sending the industrial organic compounds known to harm human and animal health down the river as far as Connecticut. GE was forced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to clean up PCB contamination around its transformer manufacturing complex in Pittsfield. But now the agency is ordering the company to clean the “Rest of River” — from Fred Garner Park in Pittsfield to the Connecticut border, and ship the waste out of state to an authorized PCB remediation facility.
But GE, faced with a sprawling, down river cleanup, estimated to cost $613 million, is fighting the EPA over what to do with the waste after it is dredged from the riverbed and riverbanks, and is proposing to dump it at sites in Lenox Dale, Lee and Housatonic.
While it is unclear whether the EPA will win this legal battle against GE over the waste issue, it is clear that the company will have a local fight and public relations nightmare on its hands if it tries to change the zoning at the Rising Pond site here.
The company bought the 148-acre property along the banks of the Rising Pond and dam in 2008 for $300,000 from Neenah Paper Company.
“GE could take a petition to the [Great Barrington] Planning Board, and subsequently to [Annual] Town Meeting,” Rembold said. “Ultimately it’s up to Town Meeting.”
Given recent outcry over the idea of more PCB landfills in the Berkshires’ backyard, and news that Housatonic homeowners are worried about their property values as some real estate agents say their clients are shunning investments here, GE may have to recalibrate its legal weapons.
It is unclear whether the company had considered the property’s zoning before it purchased the property. GE project manager Andrew Silfer could not be reached Friday.
EPA Public Affairs Specialist Kelsey O’Neil said the company normally would look into zoning issues before requesting a landfill permit, but has not done so yet in this case since it is still sticking to its plan to have the waste shipped out. EPA’s Jim Murphy also said that at this point the zoning issue is GE’s problem, since the EPA is insisting on removing the PCB sediment from Berkshire County.
Both Lenox Dale’s Woods Pond, and Lee’s Forest Street landfills, however, do appear to be sited within industrial areas. The Woods Pond landfill is situated within the Lane Construction property.
A town official in the Lee planning board office who did not want to be identified, said the area of the Forest Street landfill “is industrially zoned.” One of the actual landfill footprints at this site is about 1,000 feet from the Housatonic River, and less than 1,000 feet from the Lee Premium Outlets shopping mall, putting the entire dump area roughly 1.5 miles from downtown Lee.
The proposed dump facility here also sits on a mountainside above Goose Pond Brook, and is less than one mile from Goose Pond, a Trustees of Reservations mountain lake next to conservation land managed by the National Park Service, and crossed by the Appalachian Trail.
Rep. William “Smitty” Pignatelli (D-Lenox) was surprised to hear the Rising Pond site was residentially zoned. He said GE’s Rest of River cleanup is initially going to be focused on the stretch from Fred Garner Park to Woods Pond, and that if EPA loses its battle to ship the waste out, the first landfills will be in Lenox Dale and Lee.
“GE thinks they’ve got a case,” he added, “namely because they already have Hill 78.”
Hill 78 is GE’s PCB dump situated next to the Allendale Elementary School on the company’s former Pittsfield complex. GE is using Hill 78 as a legal precedent to make onsite landfills. Environmentalists point to Hill 78 as an example of what nobody wants, since the first attempt to contain PCBs there failed, and the landfill had to be dug up and redone. Now air monitors still loom ominously on the school playground, with the dump as a backdrop.
“We don’t need to be hysterical,” Pignatelli said, “but we need to pay attention.”
He says he “hopes and prays every night that somebody someplace is working on bioremediation” for the river cleanup, to avoid dumps — here or elsewhere — altogether. But EPA officials say that as of now, bioremediation does not work.
Pignatelli said the EPA’s Northeast Regional Administrator Curt Spaulding told him “flat out” that “no, it doesn’t work.”
Pignatelli said that after watching federal law overrule state law in a recent Otis State Forest pipeline decision, he doesn’t have “a lot of hope or expectations from the federal government to do the right thing.” In this case, however, he says the EPA and Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection “actually agree with us [about landfills], and how rare is that?”
Pignatelli also said he asked an EPA attorney if the EPA could win on the waste issue. “He said yes.”
“We need to back the EPA and DEP about no landfills. That’s who we need to be supporting. We need to talk about who we’re supporting rather than who we’re fighting. Let’s do that instead of sending out a message to the world that, with our fragile economy, we’re going to be a toxic dump.”
He says that it is natural people wouldn’t want to buy real estate in Housatonic, and that property values would be harmed, given all the signs that have been illegally nailed to trees and downtown utility poles in several towns by an underground environmental group.
“If I saw these signs all over the place that say toxic dump,” Pignatelli added, “I’m not going to even think about [buying here]. It’s putting fear into people prematurely — we are a tourist town whether we like it or not. We’re trying to bring young people back [to the Berkshires], and that’s the advertisement?”
Housatonic River Initiative (HRI) co-founder and Executive Director Tim Gray has been at this GE game for more than 20 years, battling the company over the river cleanup, over PCB-soaked bricks tossed into Pittsfield parks and forests, over Hill 78, and over attempts by the company to conceal and deny the dangers of PCBs.
Gray was silent when he learned the Rising Pond site was zoned for residential use only. He’s not used to “good news” in this department. “It puts a phenomenal layer of bureaucracy in front of GE to site a proposed dump in Housatonic,” he said, adding that the other two industrial sites in Lenoxdale and Lee will be harder to stop.
GE has state hurdles to jump as well over what level of PCB contamination is allowed in a Massachusetts landfill, Pignatelli noted.
Pignatelli said channeling concern over PCB dumps into creating regulatory hurdles like zoning might be a great way to tackle this issue. He said the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission (BRPC) and town planners “should be working on a strategy.”
He said another strategy where energy should be directed is to “ask the EPA how we can help. We can get more done with numbers. We have a big agency supporting us here.”
