Although Mason Run will not provide long term employment, it's providing steady construction employment for approximately 60 construction workers for the 10 to 12 years of development. The development brings residents who will attract employers. It's projected to result in creation of an additional 110 long-term jobs in the community.

 

The abandoned 300,000 square-foot plant and ancillary buildings constituted a serious and imminent threat to public safety and welfare. The site was contaminated primarily with hazardous substances (PCB, arsenic, lead, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and others) and some commingled residual petroleum from historic underground fuel tanks removed by CPC. Children, teenagers, or others often illegally occupied the buildings as a place to play or conduct illegal activities. At the time of acquisition, the legal tools available to the City to force the bankrupt owner to mitigate the threats to public health and safety were very limited and costly, and therefore, practically non-existent; therefore, the City acquired title to the property. Shortly after purchasing the site for a nominal amount, the City demolished the above-grade structures to mitigate that threat to health and safety. The response actions to prepare the site for development mitigated potential surface and hidden subsurface environmental impacts that threatened human health and the environment. Environmental response actions also removed the negative aesthetic impacts from the many acres of cinder/ash fill that inhibited vegetative growth and produced black dust on windy days.

 

The sheer scale of preparing the property for residential redevelopment presented the greatest challenge to the project team. The cost of site preparation was the greatest obstacle to Mason Run’s existence. Remediating over 140,000 cubic yards of contaminated cinder/ash fill covering approximately 42 acres of the site, localized areas of chemically impacted soil, and impacted fill and residual industrial contamination in and around the basements and other structures did not pose a significant technical challenge; neither did the presence of over 110,000 cubic yards of fill and concrete in the 350,000 square feet of buried basements, pits, footings, foundations, and other structures that had to be removed before homes could be constructed. The primary challenge was logistics, and the primary obstacle was money. A secondary challenge was to design the most sustainable approaches possible for addressing the site preparation challenges.

The initial cost estimate for preparing the site was approximately $9 million to $10 million. Removal of over 140,000 cubic yards of coal ash was deemed necessary to facilitate residential redevelopment of the site. One of the challenges to managing the cinder/ash fill was a requirement to maintain the existing site grade for utility placement. This meant that the two feet of cinder/ash fill would have to be replaced with clean fill after removal and verification that remediation achieved unlimited residential use criteria. The traditional approach of removing and disposing the cinder/ash fill in a landfill and replacing it with clean fill was too costly to make the project economically viable. Furthermore, it was not considered a sustainable solution, since it would use landfill space and require importation of off-site resources, namely 140,000 cubic yards of clean soil.

The project team designed and negotiated with the MDEQ the technical and regulatory specifications for an alternate, sustainable, "on-site" solution whereby clean soil was excavated from beneath the road ROWs and parks, and the cinder/ash fill then was removed from the residential lots and encapsulated as inert fill beneath pavement or clean fill in these areas. The native soil removed from the ROWs and parks then was used to replace the impacted coal ash fill removed from residential lots. As mentioned previously, this approach saved over $2.5 million in response costs and made the project economically viable.

The ultimate site cleanup costs were determined to be approximately $7.4 million. This represented costs that had to be incurred before land could be transferred to the developer and homes could be built. The project team developed a creative financing program based on Michigan's Brownfield Redevelopment Financing Act (Public Act 381 of 1996, as amended), which provides for tax increment financing (TIF) of brownfield redevelopment costs. The team designed a six-phase approach for redeveloping the site, which addressed issues of product absorption, generation of sufficient incremental taxes to securely finance completed cleanup activities, and provide sufficient time to secure brownfield financing (loans) to bridge the gap between incurring the cleanup costs and realizing the tax increment revenues from completed homes. The project team secured a $1 million state grant and $6.4 million in federal, state and local loans. The project financing program is described in more detail below.