Poison to Ivy

Petroleum is, of course, just one source of brownfield toxins. “The most costly contaminants to clean up are the chlorinated solvents—basically dry-cleaning fluids,” Harms says. “They sink to the bottom of the aquifer and so they need to be pumped up from the bottom to be removed.” Then there’s creosote, “the worst as far as the degree of harmful contaminants,” he adds. “Creosotes have pesticides in them. They are just as labor intensive as fuel-oil tars, but you need to take more safety precautions.”

Unsightly Sites

Globe isn’t the dirtiest site in the metro area that cleanup crews have dealt with. That honor goes to the former Joslyn Manufacturing & Supply site at Highway 100 and France Avenue in Brooklyn Center.

For many years, Joslyn (now part of Illinois-based MacLean Power Systems) used its facility on the 39-acre site to preserve utility poles, railroad ties, and lumber with creosote, pentachlorophenol, and copper chromated arsenic. From the 1940s until Joslyn’s operations ceased in 1980, the bulk of the treating fluid consisted of pentachlorophenol (a fungicide and preservative that’s toxic to humans) and fuel-oil solvents.

In 1983, the Joslyn property became a Superfund site and was placed on the federal National Priorities List. The federal Superfund program was established in 1980 in the wake of the Love Canal disaster in New York to fund cleanup of industrial sites that release or could potentially release substances hazardous to either human health or the environment. Joslyn had spent $17 million to clean up soils and groundwater to meet its legal obligations as mandated by federal and state regulations before vacating the site. Yet the Joslyn property remained too dirty to be redeveloped.

In 1998, a five-year, publicly funded cleanup began, which included redesigning and rebuilding the groundwater system. The total cost reached $8.5 million, with awards and investments coming from DEED ($3.9 million), the Met Council ($708,000), Real Estate Recycling ($730,000 for land acquisition), and the City of Brooklyn Center (about $3.2 million). Once cleaned up, the site attracted more than $20 million in private investment. According to Tom Bublitz, community development specialist with the City of Brooklyn Center, redevelopment of the Joslyn site has created about 350 jobs and property taxes of $623,628 as of 2006. The site now is home to Caribou Coffee’s headquarters, a Wickes Furniture warehouse, and a multi-tenant office building. In 1998, when remediation began, the land was valued at close to $1.2 million; by 2006, its assessed value was more than $19 million.

Another particularly nasty Superfund site was the former 11-acre National Lead site on Highway 7 and Louisiana Avenue in St. Louis Park, which Real Estate Recycling purchased in February. National Lead had a smelter on the site that extracted the lead from old batteries. It then sold the extracted material to battery makers and other lead “consumers.” (The company is now called NL Industries, and is based in Dallas.) Like Joslyn, National Lead did what was required under state and federal regulations before vacating the property and selling it to an auto salvage business in the 1980s. Before public funding became available, buyers of contaminated sites often used such sites for aboveground storage, with no plans to redevelop them.