It sounds like a setup for a Ronald Reagan punchline circa 1980. This week the Gowanus Canal was designated a Superfund site. So what used to be just a toxic waste dump is now . . . radioactive.
Hours after the ruling came down, Toll Brothers, which was planning to build housing in the area, announced it was backing out. So it turns out that developers can deal with decades of funky industrial sludge. What makes them scream with terror and run away is EPA lawyers.
The Gowanus Canal — the Stench Trench, the Brook of Gook — runs for 1.8 miles through some upscale Brooklyn neighborhoods. Once a functioning waterway, for decades it has been more like an open sewer glistening with sludge and emitting a distinctive aroma of industrial poison. Among New York City’s most embarrassing landmarks, it’s right up there with JFK Airport and Congressman Rangel’s office.
None of this is any secret, which is why Mayor Bloomberg had a $175 million plan to clean up the Gowanus (how about starting by renaming it as something that doesn’t sound like an overactive colon?). Recognizing a mutual public-private interest, Bloomberg hoped to rezone the area to encourage new developers to come in, and those developers would help in the clean up.
Whole Foods, which owns a site abutting the canal at Third Avenue and Third Street, once planned to build a full-sized store there by 2008. Instead, it found out the land was contaminated. So it has been removing polluted dirt. A spokesman said the company hadn’t yet decided whether to build the store.
Who would, considering what’s to come? Despite its men-in-tights name, Superfund is no comic-book hero. Not only is the label a skull and crossbones that scares away businesses and homeowners, it’s also an open invitation to a neverending litigation party.
So broad is the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, or CERCLA, law of 1980 that created Superfund, in the wake of hysteria about industrial toxins at the Love Canal in Niagara Falls, that anyone who ever had anything to do with polluting the site is liable for the entire cost of cleanup. Even if you legally disposed of your waste, if it ends up in the site, you’re on the hook — forever.
The city of New York is among those entities that could find itself getting sued by feds. It’s already been blamed as one of nine parties behind the pollution by the EPA. (The state requested the Superfund designation.) Is government suing government really what we want?
Superfund is one of the most perfect examples of how legislative action born (or at least sold as) having a laudable goal winds up chiefly benefiting the governing class. The EPA estimates it’ll take 10 to 12 years to fix the canal, at a cost of $300 to $500 million. As with all government estimates of time and money, actual results may differ by amounts ranging from enormous to gargantuan. (Time elapsed from the moment Jimmy Carter declared the Love Canal in Niagara Falls an environmental emergency to its delisting as a Superfund site: 26 years.) With 21st century big-city litigiousness in the mix, it could easily take more than 10 years for the Gowanus cleanup to even begin.
Mayor Bloomberg fought the Superfund designation because he hoped to skip the blame game and get right to construction, more housing, more everything that generates tax revenue.
The Gowanus situation typifies the Obama administration: Seizure of power from local governments and centralizing it in Washington, deafness to concerns of the voters (even when such citizens are billionaire mayors), hostility to business, and determination to erect above us all a plush, arrogant Olympus populated by lawyers, lawyers and more lawyers.
While Olympus is busy hurling Superfund thunderbolts, everyone on the ground ducks for cover. Businesses that fear being hit with a cleanup bill sue one another to try to find somebody else to stick with the cost. Churches have been sued. A Girl Scout troop in Michigan was sued because its summer camp garbage wound up in a landfill. Big chunks of whatever money is recovered in these cases go right back to the lawyers.
To clean up the Gowanus Canal, we need buckets. Instead we’re getting briefcases.