RTM Approves $1.165 Million For Environmental Testing at GHS

The Representative Town Meeting has approved $1.165 million for additional environmental testing at Greenwich High School, where PCBs and other contaminants have been discovered in the soil near the school’s west parking lot and athletic fields.

The contaminants were after an area near the school’s west parking lot was excavated to prepare for the construction of a new performing arts center  — also known as the $17 million Music Instruction Space and Auditorium, or . Now, the EPA and state DEEP have mandated that additional testing be performed on the soils under — most of which are covered with artificial turf — as well as under the parking lot and at the site of the new auditorium in order to ensure conditions are safe for excavation and construction. Before the RTM's vote on Sept. 19, the Greenwich Board of Estimate and Taxation (BET) approved the $1.165 million appropriation last month.

Although the MISA Building Committee is overseeing the auditorium construction project, the cleanup of the contaminated soil is being handled as a separate project overseen by the . Officials said once environmental testing is completed the Town will have a much clearer picture of what needs to be done and how much it will cost.

During the RTM meeting Karen Fassuliotis, chairwoman of the RTM’s Health and Human Services Committee, explained that although the MISA Building Committee has already paid for the initial testing and removal of contaminated soil adjacent to the parking lot out of its project budget. “The DPW became involved [in August] when it was asked to sign off as the Town’s agent on the manifest and paper work that was necessary to move the contaminated soil off the site,” Fassuliotis said.

“Since the DPW has experience with contaminated sites — notably the Cos Cob power plant — they now have to become the lead agency for further work on the high school site,” Fassuliotis explained. She added, however, that the environmental cleanup project will be a “collaborative effort” between the DPW; the Board of Education; AECOM, the Town’s environmental consultant (which also is handling testing at the Cos Cob Power Plant site); the MISA Building Committee; the Parks & Recreation Department; and the Greenwich Board of Health.

RTM Education Committee Chairman Robert Brady explained that the appropriation will be used to fund two parts of the project:

“The first is $560,000 for the remediation and fencing to enable the restoration and use of the five artificial fields, and to isolate the natural fields from incursion while the project is carried out in the longer term,” Brady said. “The second piece — the $605,000 — is for deeper testing: About 150 four to six-foot deep bore holes to determine what contamination if any, is in the deep fill under the athletic fields and under parts of the parking lot.”

Brady said the DPW and AECOM expect to “complete the assessment and development a long-term remediation plan by the end of March.”

Fassuliotis later added that the testing also will include “about 20 deep soil borings to determine if there are any hot spots at the excavation site at the new high school auditorium.”

It is widely known that the high school athletic fields and parking lot were built on fill that was brought into the site during construction in the early 1970s — however no one knows for sure what materials were dumped there, save for some anecdotes and limited or unofficial documentation.

Gordon Innes, chairman of the RTM Finance Committee, said “we don’t know how much it is going to cost to remediate — and we won’t know until the testing is done.”

Innes added, “The prospect of identifying the polluters is remote — so it doesn’t look like there’s ever going to be a third party recovery — but we don’t know.”

Innes said there was “genuine concern” among finance committee members “about why two [past] building projects went forward and we didn’t detect these contaminants.”

Fassuliotis said the reason the MISA Building Committee took the initital lead on the testing and remediation was because “they had the personnel and equipment in place to do follow-up testing.”

The question has come up as to whether the cost of remediation would ultimately become part of the MISA project budget. Innes said “the Board of Education and BET will have to work that out,” however, for now the BET is handling it as a separate project.

Rick Kral, chairman of the RTM Public Works Committee, said the “two immediate goals at the present time are to get the ; and to assess what needs to be done for remediation both short and long term” — and whether the work can be phased out so as to minimize disruption and spread out the cost.

Jim Boutelle, of District 8, said he was concerned that if the funds for testing and remediation are taken out of the Town’s Non-recurring Capital Accounts (i.e. contingency accounts), “What happens later in the year?”

“As I understand it we started the year with about $4 million in the reserve contingencies,” Boutelle said. “However through this appropriation — and the money already spent by MISA — we’ve now gone though about half of that. My question is — ultimately, what is the cost? As we do these borings and we discover potentially additional issues … if this project comes in potentially in the tens of millions of dollars and we blow through the contingency, how do we handle that? I agree this is not the fault of MISA, but if we blow through our reserve contingencies now, and it’s only September, what happens later in the year?”

BET chairman Stephen Walko said the town will have to cross that bridge when it comes to it.

“On a cash flow basis, we do have cash for this appropriation — we have cash in the capital non-recurring account,” Walko said. “Beyond that we’d have to look to other accounts to see what cash might be available.”

Walko added that any additional expenditure for environmental cleanup will have to be looked at in the context of next year’s town budget. He pointed out that the town just recently implemented a “debt policy” which in effect caps the town’s debt for capital projects at $210 million. He said in addition the town also has a new “fund balance policy” in place, and “all of these are implicated through this process.”

“But there is money to fund this $1.165 million request … and there are funds to address additional requests,” Walko said. “We’ll be looking at this when we start the 2013 budget in February — we’ll have to look at how this bumps up against our debt policy and make tough decisions at that time, if necessary.”

The RTM voted 152 to 13 to approve the expenditure.

Pending the outcome of the testing, remediation will likely involve removing contaminated soil in four areas around the GHS athletic fields, then "capping" with clean fill. The town is reportedly reviewing remediation options for turf fields 3 and 4, and developing plans for grass fields 2 and 5. Town officials reportedly hope to have fields 2 and 5 open in time for spring sports.

Meanwhile the piles of contaminated soil that were removed in phase one of the cleanup (the soil in the area disturbed next to the west parking lot) have been removed. Tests on the asphalt underneath reportedly did not find any residual PCB contamination and town officials hope to by the end of September.