December 13, 2007
Lincolnville residents wary over landfill plan
By DEIRDRE CONNER,
The Times-Union
A plan to clean up after an illegal dumping scandal in St. Augustine is drawing the ire of residents in the city's Lincolnville neighborhood.
The city is preparing to bring solid waste back to the site of the Riberia Street landfill, then smooth it over and cover it with 2 feet of clean dirt.
The plan is part of a settlement the city made with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection last month. A department investigation had found the city was removing waste and lime sludge from the Riberia Street landfill and dumping it in a water-filled pit on city property on Holmes Boulevard, contaminating the groundwater. The city was digging a hole at the Holmes site for another project and moved soil from the landfill to fill it in.
The department fined the city more than $33,000 and required it to clean up the Holmes site. The city also is proposing to eventually turn the Riberia site into a public park.
But the clean-up agreement is angering residents in Lincolnville, a historic area that has recently begun to gentrify.
Judith Seraphim is organizing a meeting for this evening so neighborhood residents can speak out about the matter, because public comment was not allowed at the Nov. 13 meeting where the City Commission approved the final settlement. She called the plan for the Riberia Street site environmental racism, especially in light of the historically black area's struggle for civil rights.
Seraphim said the waste should be taken to a specially lined, Class I landfill, something the city had protested because of the expense. She's worried that residents will be exposed to pollution when the waste is dumped and spread out over the entire 8 acres, and has vowed to stop the plan.
"The city could have kept their costs down by doing it the right way in the first place," she said.
The meeting will take place at 6:30 p.m. at St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church, 85 Martin Luther King Ave. Afterward, Seraphim said, "we're going to be talking to legal [advisers] and we're going to see what happens and what the neighborhood wants."
City and DEP representatives, however, said the plan will benefit the neighborhood.
John Regan, the city's chief operations officer, said the project will "basically make lemonade out of a lemon" by turning the site into a recreation area.
"This is a chance to build a very needed park," Regan said. "The site has excellent birding and wildlife viewing opportunities."
Mike Fitzsimmons, the Northeast District Waste Program administrator, said the Department of Environmental Protection was willing to allow the waste to return to the Riberia Street landfill because it would bring the site under the department's control for the first time. The dump is so old that it predated the department, and therefore wasn't monitored, he said. Now the city will be required to do semiannual groundwater testing and seal the landfill with clean dirt.
"We think that's a significant environmental improvement," Fitzsimmons said.
Because testing at the Riberia Street site has never been done before, the city will have to install wells to monitor the groundwater there. Contamination from arsenic, thallium and vinyl chloride is present in the groundwater at the Holmes Boulevard site, but Riberia won't be tested for months. It's not yet clear what will happen if significant pollution is present.
Remediation could run the gamut from pumping and treating groundwater to possible excavation, Fitzsimmons said.
The department advertised the settlement Saturday, which gives residents until Dec. 29 to formally object to it.
deirdre.conner@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4504
This story can be found on Jacksonville.com at http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/121307/met_225045723.shtml.
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