Consider the former Outboard Marine Corporation/Coke Plant site, a thirty-six acre parcel along Seahorse Drive just west of the municipal beach. Unlike most other lakefront parcels, this site underwent extensive environmental testing in the 1990's and the scope and extent of pollution has already been documented. The laundry list of contaminants includes arsenic, benzoanthracene, benzopyrene, benzofluoranthene, dibenzoanthracene, indenopyrene, dibenzofuran, 4-methylphenol, naphthalene, and other toxic substances known or suspected of causing cancer and other diseases. The pollutants are in the soil, in the groundwater, and potentially in the air if the soil is disturbed. Plumes of arsenic and phenolic compounds extend easterly from the site to the soil beneath the public beach.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) focused its assessment of cancer and non-cancer risks primarily upon "occupational and utility worker scenarios considered to be reasonable future uses for the site." Since the USEPA determined that the future use of the site would be restricted to the current and historical use of industrial and commercial, and that "a residential scenario...is not considered an appropriate future use," it analyzed the health risks to full-time residents only for comparison purposes. That comparison analysis indicated that the cancer risk to residential children exposed to subsurface soils in one area of the site would be three hundred times the allowable risk, and that the non-cancer health risk for residential children would be sixty-three times the allowable risk.

Because of the need to address these public health issues on the OMC/Coke Plant site, the USEPA proposed three alternatives in 1999 to contain or to clean up the contamination to industrial/commercial levels. The first involved the burning of polluted soils, the solidification of arsenic, the capping of soils, and land-use restrictions, at a total cost of thirty-nine million dollars. A second, more limited alternative also entailed the burning of soils and the solidification of arsenic, to be followed by the planting of trees and native grasses, at a total cost of twenty-five million dollars. The third, most comprehensive alternative added the remediation steps of removing thirty-six thousand cubic yards of contaminated soil for storage in a landfill and extracting additional contaminants via water to be pumped from wells, at a total cost of over one hundred million dollars and with estimates of completion time that ranged up to ninety years. None of these alternatives has yet been implemented, and remediation remains in the planning stage.2

It is difficult to imagine a greater disconnect between the existing environmental constraints to redevelopment and the new lakefront plan put forward by SOM at a public meeting on June 23, 2003. Without addressing these threshold issues of feasibility, the plan targets the OMC/Coke Plant site for a mixed use that includes a strong dose of high density residential. Some of these proposed residences would not only sit over contaminated soils, but would also lie within close proximity to several pollution containment cells, including a sealed-off slip that contains PCB-laden sediment dredged from the bottom of the Waukegan harbor.3 This apparent absurdity, by itself, should cause one to question the value of the SOM redevelopment plan and the wisdom of our city in having it prepared without reference to a comprehensive environmental study and remediation strategy.

Footnote 2: See the USEPA Fact Sheet entitled "Outboard Marine Corporation" (updated January 2003) found in the Appendix, which also discusses the severe pollution problems and ongoing remediation to industrial standards of the OMC Die Cast Plant on the north side of Seahorse Drive. An earlier version of this Fact Sheet was included in the city's compact disks of environmental records. SOM proposes that the Die Cast Plant site, like the Coke Plant site, be developed for mixed use, including residential.

Footnote 3: This notorious Slip Number 3 runs through the northern portion of the proposed mixed-use area but is not clearly depicted or identified on SOM maps and drawings. The same is true of the cement silos and gypsum plant, which also are missing from the maps and drawings of the harbor area.