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There is much excitement in Waukegan these days about redeveloping our lakefront.
The potential appears to be awesome, the opportunity appears to be immense, and it is easy to imagine new world-class projects below the bluff that would bolster our local economy and refurbish our city's image.
T.O.W.N. shares this enthusiasm and sense of opportunity, but we have concerns about the way in which our city has gone about its lakefront planning.
We issue this report to explain these concerns and to attempt to refocus the planning process.
Our main concern is that our city has "put the cart before the horse."
Before we brought in the Urban Land Institute (ULI) to jumpstart the planning process, before we hired Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) to prepare a redevelopment plan at a cost of more than $600,000, we should have completed a comprehensive environmental study of all lakefront areas potentially impacted by heavy industry.
This study should have shown, parcel by parcel, (1) the contaminants that were in the soil, groundwater, surface water or air; (2) the steps that would have to be taken to remove or contain the contaminants; (3) the anticipated time and cost that this remediation would entail; (4) the resources potentially available to finance this remediation; and (5) the uses that could be made of the property after remediation.
While our city currently has consultants working on such matters, we submit that the ULI and SOM planning processes should have awaited this kind of thorough environmental assessment.
We say this from experience, having just spent several
months poring over more than eleven thousand pages of environmental records
obtained from our city through the Freedom of Information Act.1
It may sound like a lot of information, but the lakefront pollution reports
in our possession are largely preliminary and piecemeal, being comprised
of ad hoc, intermittent studies of only a limited number of sites. As
can be seen from the map obtained from our city that is attached in the
Appendix, large portions of the lakefront have not yet been tested for
contaminants, and most of the parcels that have been tested to some degree
require additional testing to determine the full scope and extent of the
pollution. In light of the pollution migration noted in the existing data,
including the spreading of contamination by surface water and groundwater,
we suspect that much of the lakefront has been sufficiently impacted to
require remediation.
Why do we believe that these environmental problems should have been addressed in detail before the drawing of costly redevelopment plans?
Because we have been disturbed by what we have learned as we moved through the reams of records and came across so many cancer-causing chemicals and other dangerous substances-many in concentrations above established standards and benchmarks to protect human health and the environment-which are still in the soil, still in the groundwater, still being dispersed into the Waukegan River and presumably into Lake Michigan.
In the Lakefront Data Summaries found in the Appendix, there is a listing by parcel of the contaminants that have been discovered to date.
Additional testing of these and other sites would likely identify additional toxins.
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