Excerpt from The Commercial Dispatch, July 27, 2018. Read the full article here.
by Isabelle Altman
Partnerships between local, state and federal governments was the theme at a celebration of clean-up at Superfund sites at the former Kerr-McGee site on 14th Avenue North on Thursday.
The event -- attended by city officials and representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality and the surrounding neighborhood -- celebrated the EPA's Superfund Task Force. The task force, formed in July 2017, identified 42 recommendations, such as reducing timelines for site clean-up and communicating with community stakeholders around the sites.
Those recommendations were streamlined into five goals, such as expediting clean-up, encouraging private investment and energizing stakeholders -- things EPA Region 4 Superfund Director Franklin Hill said EPA, MDEQ and the Greenfield Environmental Multi-State Trust had been doing at Columbus' old Kerr-McGee site over the last seven years.
"We're already on the cusp of that," Hill said. "We're already taking early actions in this community."
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"We didn't do that by ourselves," Hill said. "We did that collectively ... and this community was at the forefront of it. This community are the people who held us to task. ... Even though we slipped schedules from time to time, they would remind us when we were slipping schedules."
He and Greenfield Trust Senior Strategist Lauri Gorton credited residents around the Kerr-McGee site -- located in the Memphis Town community -- for diligently pushing clean-up efforts and being involved in plans for redevelopment.
"That inclusion in the work that we're doing is the way that things should be done," Gorton said.