Special Bd. of Aldermen — 10/26/15 Page 19
Alderman Klee
Actually | have two questions and again from Alderman O’Brien, when you said about the monitoring, basically
EPA kind of hands it over to DES so the State would do the monitoring or do you continue to do the monitoring.
Ms. Taylor We haven't determined, that’s part of the negotiations, we will determine who will be doing long
term monitoring at the site. Say if it were an NPL site, if it was a fund lead project, EPA would do it for the first
10 years and then the State would take it over. But in this case, you could have the developer do it, you could
have other entities do it, we just don’t know that yet.
Alderman Klee
Right that is part of the negotiation. My other question was and pardon me for not knowing this, but the Fimbel
and again apologize for going over to part 2 of this, but would the owner of that property have any
responsibility as far having to do the clean-up. | know they accepted the Tannery waste and kind of created a
dump and so on, but if we did have it removed you talked about the $6.5 million, would they in fact have any
responsibility. Could we tap them on the shoulder for any of that.
Mr. Millan-Ramos I’m not an attorney to answer with certainty that question but what | do know that the local
developer has a purchase & sale agreement with the property owner. And it is my understanding that he is
also interested in doing the same with the City property, | don’t know to what extent he has engaged in
conversations with the City, but that is my understanding.
Alderman Lopez
| just wanted to what we talking about a few minutes, that the EPA was under the impression that we were just
asking about clean-up of the asbestos property, | had explicitly mentioned the two lagoons in my e-mail, where
| was asking for a presentation on those expenses and | am under the impression that you weren’t able to find
any way to get you a direct quote. You just have the rough ballpark numbers so | just wanted to point out.
| also wanted to advocate for the neighbors in this kind of scenario, because again, the City in conversation
here has been continually been defined by one contact person within the Mayor's staff. The City asked us for
this, the City told us that, we have spoken to the City and the neighbors are not privy to all that conversation
and most of us here aren’t either. So when we do move forward with this, remembering that there are three
players, | think as a City we should be making sure we all know what is being proposed by each side. What is
going to be built, what we are going to be asked to approve, what the EPA is willing to present and why and
then what the City is able to do and how it is understood by the residents. Because | think it is not a very good
deal if we go through all this process and then decide we don’t want to give the zoning because he’s trying to
build a casino or whatever.
The presentation that was done informally suggested that it would be residential, so there is a big difference
between family housing, condos and elderly housing. | think these are all pieces that we need to understand.
Especially with respect to my fellow Aldermen, the initial informal presentation suggested that a gift would be
given to the City of the riverfront property upon which could be built the bridge and the waterfront, but | don’t
think | heard the developer actually say he planned to do that or that the TIF was even necessarily going to be
used about that. He was a little bit vague about what the TIF meant and that is rightfully so because we are
the ones who ultimately have to authorize it. So | think we should find out what is being proposed so that we
can gauge the value of what we are putting into it and what the clean-up options are.
My summary if | understand it correctly of what was originally being proposed in the informal meeting was the
two lagoons at the tannery site which are still with sludge, goo, gum, whatever you want to call it. And then
there was during the tannery’s operation, waste was removed from that and put on the Fimbel Door property
so that property as well has some contamination. But there is also the waste from | believe it was the Broad
