Ogden wants U.S. to pay for soil tests

OGDEN — State environmental officials refuse to sign off on a high-adventure recreation center development until more soil and groundwater tests are completed.

The city will go ahead with those tests, but officials do not want to have to pay for all the tests the entire downtown mall site will need.

So Mayor Matthew Godfrey plans to seek a brownfield designation that would make the 20-acre parcel eligible for federal funds to pay for additional environmental tests.

David Harmer, city community and economic development director, said the new tests for the center will take at least three to four weeks.

State Department of Environmental Quality representatives said last week that they could not issue a "letter of no further action" on the site based on two rounds of tests that found petroleum and tetrachloroethylene, a solvent.

"We're not comfortable issuing that (the letter) at this time just because the studies that they did do were rather preliminary," DEQ environmental scientist Mark Novak said Thursday. "At the same time, what they have discovered out there doesn't really point to a lot of contamination."

City officials hope that letter will convince one of the institutions involved in financing the recreation center, GE Commercial Finance, that the contaminants pose no liability.

To avoid similar delays when it comes to other projects at the mall site, the city will pursue the brownfield designation, Godfrey said.

Such a designation makes contaminated land eligible for federal funding that would allow DEQ to conduct environmental tests and research the land's historic use, said Brent Everett, an environmental program manager for DEQ.

Then, any necessary cleanup can be paid for by previous property owners, developers or other parties.

Novak said the city's second round of soil and groundwater tests showed petroleum concentrations as high as 520 parts per million. The regulatory limit is 10 parts per million. Concentrations of tetrachloroethylene, used in dry-cleaning and metal degreasing, were as high as 13 parts per billion, more than twice the limit.

Potential sources of the contamination include a gas station, an auto repair shop and a radiator repair shop that were on the site before the mall was constructed 25 years ago.