Special Bd. of Aldermen — 10/26/15 Page 15
Alderman Dowd
And as | understand it, the TIF was to clean up the asbestos portion of this and do the interchange with Broad
Street Parkway?
Ms. Taylor I’m not clear on the details on that, that is really between the City and the developer but we do
understand that the developer will be looking to get some level of a TIF and | don’t know to the extent of that.
Mayor Donchess
The details of what the TIF would cover, it would cover whatever the City decides it should cover and for
whatever amount the City decides. | guess on the first question at least my thought would be any of the three
parties can stop the project in the sense the EPA decides that they don’t want to do it, there’s no money. If the
City decides we don’t want to do it, they can’t go ahead as we’ve already heard without the zoning, the TIF, the
subdivision, all these different approvals that would require both Aldermen approval and if the developer
decided he didn’t want to go ahead, there’s not private investment so that would stop the project. So any of
the three could really veto the approach.
Ms. Taylor The current approach yes.
Mayor Donchess
The approach we are talking about.
Ms. Taylor And in terms of the allocation, that is both EPA and the developer are contributing funds towards
this, like we said before, the developer is contributing the lion’s share of those funds. Any other participation
either by the State or the City has yet to be worked out or even between the developer and EPA. Those are all
part of negotiations that have yet to take place. We hope to start those negotiations shortly but they would be
confidential and we have to make sure we are on board with this approach first before we kind of move into the
negotiation phase.
President McCarthy
| think pragmatically the situation we are in is we need to decide whether we go forward with an approach that
caps some of the waste in place. | think if you try to pursue the complete removal, that is not going to happen
under the developer’s money | don’t think because it doesn’t make economic sense. So that means if you
don’t do this, then you are waiting for funding which may take years to do a full clean-up and we don’t know
what happens to the property.
Ms. Taylor Essentially there is no reason to think that the clean-up would be any different if it was listed on the
NPL.
President McCarthy
Pragmatically that’s the first decision we’ve got to make is do any of us want to pursue some variant of this
solution. Once we do that, we can talk about do we take some of the waste off-site, how does that get paid for,
can the TIF afford to pay for that. I’m not averse to the City kicking in some amount of money to make the site
cleaner and make the neighbors happy with it. | don’t think we can bond $32 million dollars to clean up a site
that we don’t even own. I’ve had some conversations with the Attorney’s office about whether that is either
feasible. | think we can make the case that if we are doing something that makes that a better part of the
community and has public interest as well as benefiting the private, that we can look at that.
