Page 4 of 5
In response, the group founded the Clean Waterfront Project, which is aimed at cajoling developers into conducting stringent cleanups on the waterfront. The waterfront project's director, Leslie Caplan, a politically inexperienced lawyer and Canadian transplant, quickly began to look at the Giants' stadium proposal and to wonder about the foundation of its environmental process. Nothing about that process seemed quite right.
First, Geomatrix was being paid by the Giants. How could anyone expect the firm's findings to be completely impartial?
Perhaps the biggest hole Baykeeper found in the environmental impact report prepared for the Giants, however, involved 40 acres of land south of China Basin Channel, which the team plans to use for a parking lot. The land, pieces of which are owned by Catellus Development Corp. and the Port of San Francisco, is at least as highly contaminated as the ballpark site.
The Giants' environmental consultants did not study the parking site as part of the stadium project.
The land to be used for parking supported the same types of industrial uses as the ballpark site. But the proposed parking lot is connected to a disconcerting bit of history that does not apply to the ballpark site itself: For most of the 1980s and '90s, a toxic-waste handler, H&H Shipping Services, operated on the future Giants parking lot. H&H cleaned out toxic waste storage tanks and sawed them into scrap metal, among other risky activities.
The Giants' explanation of the decision not to test the land seems less than compelling: The team said plans to lease the land from Catellus and the port were not completed until after Geomatrix had drawn up its work plan for the review of the ballpark site.
City and state officials accepted that explanation without question.
At every public hearing on the environmental review of or the lease proposal for the stadium site, Baykeeper asked for a delay and a more thorough study. For the most part, no one paid attention; planning commissioners, city supervisors, and port officials all voted the project through.
Watching this fast-track process, Caplan came to a realization: The Giants weren't the only ones with a financial incentive to minimize the potential harm of leaving the polluted land at the stadium site intact. The city had the same motivation.
The port owns the land that will become the stadium; the Giants will lease it for about $1.2 million a year. If an intensive cleanup were required, the cost of that remediation would have to be calculated into the fair market rent paid by the Giants.
And Paul Osmundson, the port's development director, says that would have cost the port and the city significant amounts of money.
Osmundson worked on the Embarcadero Roadway Project, where the city dug up miles of waterfront to lay down a median divider with palm trees, and watched as the water board and the state EPA required the city to pay millions of dollars for disposal of contaminated bayfront dirt in landfills in Utah.
"Had the regulatory agencies required that kind of cleanup [for the new Giants stadium], the port would not have gotten anything," Osmundson says. "The fair market value would have been zero."
Eventually, however, one member of the Board of Supervisors listened to Baykeeper. Leslie Katz asked the city's underfunded Department of the Environment to conduct a review of Geomatrix's findings.
That same week, the water board approved the Giants' lease and environmental review, rendering the Department of the Environment's findings essentially meaningless. (The study will be published sometime this month.) But the request for such a study opened a window on the extremely questionable process by which the Giants obtained environmental approval for a baseball stadium on China Basin.
Because the Department of the Environment is understaffed and lacking in scientific expertise, the head of the Board of Supervisors' Citizen's Advisory Committee on Hazardous Waste agreed to do a review of the Giants' environmental impact report and the Geomatrix data associated with it -- for free.
Barney Popkin works for Tetratech Inc., a large environmental consulting firm. Popkin makes a living testing toxicity in ground water at industrial sites. He has worked on more than 50 such projects over the years, including several Superfund sites.
Initially, Popkin was shocked by some of Geomatrix's findings and methods. Why had the firm dug wells and soil sampling points so far apart? Why had it averaged levels of toxics, apparently underestimating the toxicity of the site?
But most shocking, in Popkin's eyes, were Geomatrix's conclusions about the Giants' plan for dealing with sewers at the stadi-um site.
As part of the stadium project, the Giants propose to seal a sewer line that runs from east to west through the middle of the property, more or less parallel to the bayfront. That sewer line is old, cracked, leaky, and porous. Apparently, several scientists say, the sewer now acts as a sort of siphon, sucking polluted ground water from the property into the pipe and carrying it away. This siphon effect, it seems, has created two water tables at the stadium site, both of which flow toward the middle of the property and the sewer pipe, rather than into the bay.
The team plans to cap the sewer on Berry Street and build a new sewer line on King Street. If this is done, some experts say, the current, artificial hydraulic system at the site will change; ground water will flow to the bay, as it does in most bayfront plots. Such a flow would probably allow the extremely high levels of petroleum products and BTEX found at Well 6, as well as cyanide found in the northern portion of the site, to migrate toward and into the bay.
