Saturday, May 17, 2003
Annette Phillips and Ian Elliot
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The Kingston Whig-Standard
Kim Donovan has an ambitious plan for revitalizing a vacant and crumbling section of Queen Street. He envisions a handsome mixed-use development for the four blocks of downtown on which he based the logo and the name of his development company, Kincore Holdings. Donovan pictures the area as a bustling people place that welcomes tourists and acts as a gateway to the city's historic downtown core. But there's a reason the project is up in the air nearly a decade after Donovan made an offer on his first Kingston property: The cluster of shops, offices, apartments and a parking garage would sit on one of the most contaminated pieces of property in Kingston's downtown core.
Toxic coal tar blobs from an old city-owned gasification plant, along with some gas and oil tanks buried underground, have hampered the project and continue to drive up costs. Kincore Holdings has also been battling the markets and waiting for the city to make decisions about its own properties. The barriers to construction are beginning to cause frustration. "Our goal is to build a portfolio of high-quality, income-producing properties and we wish to move ahead with that," Donovan said in a series of candid interviews over the past several weeks. "There comes a time when you have to decide how long you can justify holding vacant, underutilized lands within the overall portfolio."
Eight years ago, Donovan came to Kingston with a background in commercial real estate development, a brand new company, and a vision for revitalizing the city's historic downtown core. A believer in the theory that a community's economic health lies in the vitality of the downtown, Donovan started to buy up derelict properties and Kincore Holdings began a costly and painstaking restoration exercise along Brock, King and Queen streets. Kincore owns a number of properties in the blocks around City Hall, but the company's "raison d'etre," as he describes it, is the redevelopment of lower Queen Street.
The project is now up in the air while the city finishes another study on the derelict buildings at 19, 21 and 23 Queen St. Kincore has a conditional offer on the three buildings, tucked between the police station and the city's electrical substation. The heritage buildings are also subject to all the attendant preservation requirements. But Donovan questions whether the buildings are structurally sound enough to withstand the excavation needed to remove coal tar and other debris buried beneath the surface.
The cleanup work, required by the Ministry of the Environment, is daunting. Underground pipes and a tunnel full of coal tar, a gas generator and some old gasholders are just some of the environmental hazards that must be removed from beneath the houses, according to reports prepared for Kincore and the city.
When the city tried to clean up the adjacent bus barns site in 1999 - a condition of the sale to Kincore - the city's contractor, Duke Engineering, estimated costs of $289,000 for demolishing and cleaning up 19 to 23 Queen St. Duke found lead, asbestos, benzene, PCBs and other contaminants in and under the buildings, which have been abandoned for years. "Coal tar contamination was visually or olfactorily identified ... below 19B, 21 and 23 Queen St.," the Duke Engineering report said.
During drilling tests, Duke found a steel structure on top of contaminated fill below 21 Queen St., which the company thought to be part of the old gasification plant. "This drilling result suggest(s) a tar sump or valve chamber ... below the floor slab of 21 Queen St.," the Duke report states. "There remains the possibility that other undetected pockets or zones of overburden coal tar contamination exist on the ... site," Duke warned.
Monitoring wells on and around Donovan's proposed development have found coal tar and its constituents leaching from the site of the old gasification plant that once operated in the two-block area surrounded by King, Ontario and Queen streets and Place d'Armes. The same two-block area also contains as many as 12 underground storage tanks for gas, diesel or fuel oil and was once home to a coal storage yard and an automotive repair business, according to a 1995 report by GeoCor Engineering.
The city removed remnants of the gasification plant - most of which had been buried half a century earlier - in the summer and fall of 1999. It ignored a warning from GeoCor, a Kingston geo-technical engineering firm, that the cleanup would be far more costly and complicated than the city expected. When the cleanup bill ballooned from an $800,000 estimate to more than $2.3 million for just one property, the city shut down the project and proclaimed the site clean.
The city treated 1.6 million litres of groundwater, removed 300,000 litres of coal tar and 217,000 litres of oily water and trucked away 5,400 tonnes of solid waste. But it didn't clean up the mess from the old gasification plant. In fact, unknown amounts of coal tar had migrated underground to neighbouring properties.
On April 4, 2000, in a 15-to-1 vote, city council told its environmental engineer to start digging test holes downtown to find out how big the remaining mess is. Council also allotted $20,000 to the project and recoup the cost "with the future proceeds of the land sales/leases," according to a council document. The work was never done.
In February this year, council again approved a coal tar mapping study. The Ministry of the Environment didn't order the study, but it suggested a comprehensive set of bore holes be dug to find out the extent of contamination, said John Allen, the ministry's regional manager. The ministry receives annual reports based on some two dozen monitoring wells that have been installed by consultants going back to the 1970s.
Allen defends the city's progress on coal tar. "This has been an ongoing project ever since the decommissioning of the former bus barns," Allen said. Coal tar mapping was one of the recommendations of the city's cleanup strategy, he added. "The (study) pointed to risks to the bus barns site and to neighbouring property ... One of the recommendations was further delineation of the (coal tar) plume," Allen said in an interview.
Even though it has taken three years and two council approvals to get the study started, the ministry is "satisfied" that the city has been diligent in its efforts to study and contain the coal tar problem. Today, the city's Web site boasts of a "successful environmental cleanup."
Scott Cordell, president of GeoCor Engineering, says the list of things the city didn't do when it was cleaning up the bus barns site is a lot longer than the list of accomplishments. The cleanup took place in a confined area that didn't touch contaminants under the road or adjacent buildings, such as the police headquarters. City consultants also didn't look in the network of underground service tunnels and utility corridors, Cordell said. Cordell hasn't heard that the city found or cleaned up any of the old gasoline works that are known to exist underground. "There are a lot of things that haven't been addressed," he said.
Coal tar isn't the only problem Donovan faces on Queen Street. The city, which sold Donovan his properties, has yet to decide what it will do with its own properties in the four blocks surrounded by King, Queen and Wellington streets and Place d'Armes. What lies in store for the city-owned police station - police are moving to new headquarters to be built on Railway Street - and the electrical substation hasn't been determined. There is no timetable for construction of the new police building.
There are other private lands in the four-block area Donovan intends to develop but until there's an overall strategy, Kincore can't build anything, Donovan said. "It's not clear that you can move a development forward in this area yet," he said.
The city extracted an agreement from Donovan to consult with the community and do a design study before building anything in the area. Kincore and the city started the $100,000 North Block study in February. The parties are sharing the cost. But Donovan had to suspend the work until the city settles on a development strategy and decides what it will let Kincore do with the buildings at 19, 21 and 23 Queen St.
A city facility study, a study on the Queen Street buildings and the city's coal tar study must be finished before decisions can be made on Donovan's project, said George Wallace, acting manager of the city's planning department. If everything goes according to plan, the studies and their recommendations should be completed by fall. But analysis of the recommendations and a development strategy solid enough for Donovan to build on could take much longer, Wallace said.
The city is looking at its administrative quarters which have the mayor and chief administrative officer for example, based at City Hall while most of the finance staff is on Counter Street. At least one city department has expressed an interest in moving from its cramped space at City Hall to the Queen Street police building when the police move out. But it, too, is a contaminated site.
In the late 1990s, pure coal tar was scraped from an automotive hoist in the basement of the police building. When the hoist raised police cars for repair, coal tar oozed up from beneath the building. Chemical PAHs, the volatile compound formed when coal tar and other petroleum products meet oxygen, were detected in the building. The hoist was sealed and changes were made to the ventilation system. There has never been a complaint from workers of the mysterious illnesses that have plagued employees at the Macdonald Cartier building, said Deputy Police Chief Dan Murphy. Even so, a sump pump in the station's basement has continued to pull up coal tar elements for about a decade.
The city is legally bound to continue to pump and monitor the police building. "We are finding PAHs associated with coal tar and other petroleum contamination in fairly low concentrations," confirmed Paul MacLatchy, city environmental engineer. Although definitely contaminated, the sump water is clean enough to be pumped into the city's sanitary sewer system, MacLatchy said.
A block away from police headquarters, provincial employees have boycotted the Macdonald Cartier building as a result of health concerns stemming from coal tar. Coal tar has also been found around the Barrack Street LCBO. Liquor store manager Robert Kempe said his employees haven't raised any health concerns. "Nothing like that at all," he said.
The city and the provincial government have known since the 1970s that coal tar at levels far above cleanup guidelines is oozing through bedrock in downtown Kingston. However, owners of most of the contaminated properties have been allowed to develop them by cleaning up the worst of the toxins and building in such a way as to mitigate the effects of contamination - no below-ground living space, for example, and no growing plants for food on the land.
Proper ventilation, sealed foundations and monitoring will ensure that toxins from the coal tar don't cause illness to users of the buildings, Donovan says. He's confident in Kincore's ability to erect buildings that are impervious to contamination. He believes the work can be done carefully enough not to make the problem worse. Besides, Donovan's properties in the Queen Street area have all been purchased from the city, which remains stuck with any environmental liability because it owns the coal tar. "We really do view ourselves as being in a partnership with the city trying to get an underdeveloped area back into production," Donovan said.
Just over a year ago, the city appointed Donovan to its brownfields task force, a group looking for ways to encourage development of contaminated properties. Even if Kingston had a brownfields strategy and the popular tax-based financing in place today it wouldn't be enough to spark widespread redevelopment, Donovan says. The city's brownfield program won't be a "panacea" for development of contaminated lands. "It will give us more than we have now, but we need more than tax incremental financing to kick things into gear," he says.
Donovan takes a pragmatic view of the contamination issue, which he stresses is just one of the factors complicating his project. "It's like solving any problem. You acknowledge it, accept it and figure out what to do about it." Donovan says he and other private-sector interests must help the city in its quest to maintain and improve a "vibrant, yet fragile," downtown. Contamination can't be allowed to erode the core of the city, he adds.
"Nurture the heart and the rest will take care of itself. We either continue to develop and grow or we start to die."
THIS SERIES
Yesterday: Confronting Kingston's toxic past.
Today: Four barren blocks, one bold vision
Tuesday: Pollution derails dock of dreams
Wednesday: Waterfront diamonds in the rough
Thursday: The price of success - is it too high?
Friday: Rising from the ashes: The search for a plan
THE NORTH BLOCK
Owner and developer: Kincore Holdings Ltd., City of Kingston and other private landowners
Location: Four-block area of downtown bordered by Place d'Armes, Wellington Street, Ontario Street and Queen Street
Size: About 10 hectares; 4.34 hectares under the control of Kincore
History: Former site of a coal gasification plant, one of 40 Ontario sites where coal was converted to gas for heating and lighting. Former site of gas stations and underground fuel storage tanks.
Current use: Commercial, including a food store, fitness centre and police station. Most of the four-block area is paved for parking.
Contamination: Coal tar in soil, groundwater and bedrock. Fuel and diesel oil from old gas plants, lead, petroleum and antimony, a byproduct of lead smelting.
Illustration:
* Colour Photo: Michael Lea, The Whig-Standard / "It's like solving any problem. You acknowledge it, accept it and figure out what to do about it," says Kim Donovan, who has ambitious plans for a four-block development downtown. The problem? The buildings would sit on one of the most contaminated pieces of property in Kingston's
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Developer's 8-year Battle to Build on Toxic Land: City Slow to Make Decisions. |
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