29 May 2008
greening our brownfields: refuelling stops
The City of Kitchener has 19 abandoned gas stations but has developed a tax incentive (TIF) program to encourage the redevelopment of abandoned industrial and commercial sites. It lets the city return the cost of a cleanup to the owner of a dirty site by lowering property taxes. Kitchener is one of three Ontario municipalities (others are Hamilton and Marathon) participating in a pilot project by Ontario Centre for Environmental Technology Advancement aims to help all Ontario municipalities see former gasoline stations cleaned up, sold and redeveloped. To further this goal, the provincial government in 2007 amended The Environmental Protection Act and the Ontario Waters Resources Act to reduce the liability of the owners who originally polluted the ground. (1)
Locally, there is a new Tim Hortons at the corner of Frederick and Lancaster streets used to be a gas station. Other adaptive reuses of abandoned gas stations: an A&W fast-food restaurant at River Road and Victoria Street, a car wash that does detailing at the corner of Ottawa and Weber streets, and another Tim Horton's at the corner of Charles Street and Borden Avenue. As well, John Bergen has opened two City Cafe bakeries in former gas stations in Kitchener and Preston/Cambridge (more details with photo credits at end of blog).In spite of their convenient corner locations, these abandoned gas stations pose a significant financial risk to the oil companies who may still own them and to potential redevelopers considering their purchase. Buried underground is a long list of contaminants that can migrate through the soil and have potential to contaminate groundwater sources: petroleum
hydrocarbons, benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, xylene, lead and ether.
Why haven't they been cleaned up according to the "polluter pays" principle? Enforcing the cleanup is the responsibility of the Ministry of Environment and a private non-profit organization called the Technical Standards and Safety Association. But the ministry only gets involved if contamination goes off the site
or there's reason to believe it could cause environmental problems. The technical standards association deals only with operating stations.
Always there are legal loopholes: "only if contaminants move across property lines can the owner be
forced to environmental remediation; hence, oil companies reluctant to sell site because even if site cleaned up, sold and redeveloped, they can be hit for more cleanup costs years later: For example, An oil company cleans up a site to the commercial standards of the day. A developer buys the property and builds a strip mall. Ten years later, the mall is sold, and a new developer wants to tear it down to build an apartment building. The cleanup standards for apartment buildings are much higher than for strip malls, so the newest owner can sue the oil company to recover the costs of the additional work." (2)
The issue of greening our brownfields keeps coming back to the money. Per local reporter T. Pender, the Belmont Esso site (cor Union Boulevard /Belmont Avenue) has assessed value @ $232,000 with property taxes @ $6,600 (vacant commercial tax rate).
Where others see barriers, John Bergen of City Cafe Bakeries saw an opportunity or two: prime locations for two very popular local restaurants (one at corner Victoria/ Strange in Kitchener & the other King Street West and Chopin Drive in Preston/Cambridge). Record reporter Chuck Howitt tells us: "Bergen loves old two-bay service stations. They're virtually all the same -- 40 feet wide by 30 feet deep with high ceilings, large windows and a garage door that rolls up in summer. Because they're built at grade, it's easy to wheel in the centrepiece of City Cafe -- a huge, 5,000-pound wood-burning firebrick oven that cooks pizza at a blistering 800F....Apart from the giant oven and roll- up garage door, other quirks of the Kitchener cafe include an old fare box from a Cleveland transit bus that customers put their money into, a funky retro eating area, hanging blackboards featuring specials of the day and sundry witticisms, and a lime-green and school bus-yellow colour scheme on the outside of the building... The Kitchener cafe, which employs five to six full-time workers and several part-time employees, has annual revenues of $1.3 million.The contaminated soil does not have to be removed as long as the business doesn't "go off the pad," says Bergen. That means he can't put any additions on the old building." (3)Photos copyright Sandamara Images 2004 top to bottom: Kitchener City Cafe bakery; Lai Lai Chinese restaurant immediately adjacent to City Cafe offers up excellent lunch specials at an extemely affordable price; and the Lai Lai's lion sculpture at the front door reminds RR of Tony the Tiger mascot once used to promote Imperial Oil's Esso brand of fuels.
Sources: (1) Terry Pender, Topping up the Cleanup, The Record February 01, 2008; (2) Magda Konieczna, Gas stations out to pasture, The Record August 27, 2005; (3) CHUCK HOWITT, SOMETHING BREWING; Owners of the popular City Cafe bakery, pizza restaurant plan outlet in Cambridge; The Record. Kitchener, Ont.: May 12, 2007.
Labels: brownfields
19 May 2008
greening our brownfields
Redevelopment of brownfield sites(abandoned and contaminated industrial properties) is subject subject to increasingly complicated regulations: site remediation and approvals, official plan amendments, draft and secondary plans for subdivision, servicing and engineering agreements, and project financing.
Fundamentally what has been holding back brownfield redevelopment is the issue of who pays, or should pay for the cleanup. Most people agree that it’s the polluter who should pay. However, these liability issues have not been sufficiently addressed by all three levels of government, and frequently developers inherit the liabilities of the previous owner. According to R. Letkeman," if a purchaser can't be certain he won't be sued over contamination in the years to come, liability becomes the issue, with litigation lawyers sitting on the fence." (2)
"Brownfields guru Mitch Fasken* .... believes that purchasers of brownfield sites should be given a 'liability holiday to help overcome the obstacle of regulatory liability. He calls on the federal and provincial governments to revise tax rules and allow for the expensing of remediation costs. 'Liabilities are the biggest barrier not so far addressed adequately by any government. The problem rears its head at the time when you reach the site-decommissioning stage.'” Another writer agrees and draws attention to "difficulty in obtaining final closure or approvals after cleanup." (2)
"Developers now are moving into sites with much-more-difficult contaminants. PCE, for instance, is a dry-cleaning solvent but its threshold is only 5 parts/billion, or virtually impossible to measure. Even if they’re not a very high toxic risk, these contaminants require more creative solutions of chemical treatment, soil management and so on. The old dig-and-dump system of 25 years ago isn't valid anymore.” (2) As well, new environmental remediation techniques are being explored such as bioremediation whereby A mixture of naturally occurring agents like yeast, bacteria or fungi is injected into the soil and groundwater to break down chemicals and contaminants, so that they no longer pose a threat to human health. on-site. bioremediation takes longer than traditional technologies to carry out, it can also be cheaper. cf. Hamilton's Beach Blvd. site: "the traditional dig and dump approach would have taken approximately one and a half to two months at a cost of about $1.2 million. Bioremediation will take about nine months but will cost about $450,000." (1)
City of Kitchener is on the vanguard of such TIF (tax incremental financing) to encourage remediation & redevelopment of its brownfield sites. Examples include: the Arrow Shirt factory conversion into residential loft housing; the Woodside former Canadian Blower Forge infill development into mix of housing. Not to be left behind, the City of Hamilton has appoint ed its own Brownfields Co-ordinator, Luciano Piccioni, and put in place some financial incentive programs:
a) One program pays for half the costs of the required environmental studies, up to a maximum of $10,000 per study to a maximum of two studies per property.
b) A redevelopment grant [that is] essentially a tax rebate of the municipal share of the increase in taxes for a period of up to 10 years or up to the point where we've repaid the eligible costs of demolition, land remediation and infrastructure upgrading. (2)
Such programs make financial sense as without remediation/redevelopment, these properties represent a significant loss of tax revenue. As one article explained: "levelled and minimally maintained, their owners content to pay the reduced taxes on vacant industrial land indefinitely because they cannot see a way of recouping the prohibitive cleanup costs. Villemaire, a member of Royal LePage Commercial Inc.'s industrial sales, would like to see 'Inculpability Status' introduced in Ontario, whereby present land users are indemnified against liability concerns for past contamination." **
"I always say you have to look
at brownfield sites as invested capital.
The municipality, other levels of
government and previous taxpayers have invested capital
and put in the infrastructure***, which right now is sitting dormant." --Mitch Fasken
at brownfield sites as invested capital.
The municipality, other levels of
government and previous taxpayers have invested capital
and put in the infrastructure***, which right now is sitting dormant." --Mitch Fasken
Notes: *"Mitchell Fasken, president of Jannock Properties and chair of the Urban Development Institutes' contaminated land subcommittee, who says, "Bill 56 is a great piece of legislation that will kick-start brownfield redevelopment in Ontario. Fear of environmental liability is the `dog that bites' when it comes to brownfields redevelopment. This legislation goes a long way toward muzzling that dog." Per Ontario Hansard.
** the question of who would be paying the environmental cleanup costs is at the heart of the City of Kitchener inflated purchase price of part of the former Uniroyal site and prompted this exploration of brownfield remediation and will be subject of another blog to follow.
*** water, sewer, roads and transit are already in place.
(1) Sources: (1) Toronto Star, March 20, 2004, www.thestar.com; (2) Rich Letkeman, Fasken: Help Us Develop Brownfields http://www.nopills.com/Articles.htm ;
Labels: brownfields
02 May 2008
seeding clouds
"Water drives a hard bargain. You need it for life and to nourish your crops and animals. But it can take as well as give and can turn nasty in an instant." --Marq de Villiers, Dangerous World
William Langewiesche's recent letter from China "Stealing Weather" (1) provides a detailed chronology of attempts to make rain by seeding clouds with dry ice or silver iodide from 1946 to now. In this article he describes the first experiments by General Electric scientists in 1946 to produce rain to China's attempts to "stop any drizzle from spoiling the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics. The concern is that at this time of year, at the appointed hour, there is a 40% chance of rain. To lower the odds, action units will stand alert upwind of the city, ready to wring the clouds dry before they can drift over the stadium." He reports that in 2006 the Chinese fired a million rounds at the weather, and launched 80,000 rockets and dispersed into the atmosphere 26,158 pounds of dry ice, 1,487 pounds of silver iodide, and 2,300 gallons of liquid nitrogen. Langewiesche assures his readers, "There is no doubt that human activities can change the weather. Global warming is the obvious example. Furthermore, in controlled laboratory experiments silver iodide and other seeding agents have been proved to provoke precipitation."
"The most important problem does not lie in understanding the laws of the objective world, and thus being able to explain it, but in applying the knowledge of these laws actively to change the world."-- Chairman Mao (1)
Marq de Villiers' Dangerous World ( Penguin Canada 2008) details past efforts by the Chinese to control nature in his overview of flooding disasters. China's two largest rivers, the Yellow/Huang He aka "China's Sorrow" and the Yangtze/Chang Jiang have historically been prone to massive, devastating floods. According to de Villiers, "human actions have exaggerated the effects [i.e. of flooding]; massive deforestation* upstream has removed the reservoirs that once cushioned the flow, and flooding continued all through the twentieth century...in 1998, a major catastrophe was narrowly averted...nonetheless, more than 2,000 people drowned, 13.8 million were driven from their homes, 2.9 million houses were destroyed, and 9 million hectares of crops were ruined....the floods affected an area inhabited by more than 240 million people, a fifth of China's considerable population." De Villiers makes mention of the immense Three Gorges Dam, the latest Chinese engineering feat accompanied by massive 'collateral damage" to the environment, which has been built "to act as a reservoir...to convey massive quantities of water northward to the arid North China Plain, part of what is intended to be the largest re-engineering of a national water supply in human history." How successful will this project be? Time will tell. De Villiers references many instances where heavy rains far exceeded human projections and wiped out the protection offered by these marvels of human engineering.
"For the purpose of attaining freedom in the world of nature, man must use natural science to understand, conquer, and change nature, and thus attain freedom from nature." --Chairman Mao (1)**Notes: *massive deforestation as part of the nineteenth century settlement process led to repeated floodings throughout the Grand River watershed and ultimately to the creation of the dams administered by the Grand River Conservation Authority; we too are courting disaster with this century's version of deforestation i.e. the urban sprawl that continues to remove trees and blanket our soil with impermeable surfaces. ** This quotation illustrates a significant gap in our understanding of man's relationship with the natural world and how difficult it will be to overcome various cultural perceptions in order to resolve the global warming/climate change crisis.
Photos copyright Sandamara Images 1998-2001: cloud cover is ever present in the James Bay Lowlands.
Photos copyright Sandamara Images 1998-2001: cloud cover is ever present in the James Bay Lowlands.
Sources: (1) William Langewiesche Letter from China, "Stealing Weather, " Vanity Fair May 2008.
Labels: water
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