Excerpt from Florida Times Union. Read entire article here.
by Steve Patterson, August 2, 2021
After sitting idle more than 40 years, a badly polluted part of Jacksonville’s Talleyrand waterfront could become a working dock again once a long-awaited cleanup is finished.
The former site of a Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. factory and warehouse has become the subject of a development agreement city officials are pursuing to reopen the property at 1611 Talleyrand Ave.
The agreement, which could be introduced to Jacksonville’s City Council Aug. 10, would offer CertainTeed Gypsum Operating Co. LLC up to $3.4 million in property-tax breaks if it invests at least $55 million and creates at least 20 jobs by the end of 2024.
The agreement “seems like a pretty good deal,” city Chief Administrative Officer Brian Hughes said before the Mayor’s Budget Review Committee signed off last week.
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State scientists said in 2003 that the remaining pollution posed real health threats and in 2010 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency added the site to its National Priorities List of places needing cleanup under the agency’s Superfund program.
That work started modestly last year, with crews clearing overgrown plants, removing foundations of long-ago demolished buildings and setting up barriers to keep stormwater from flowing offsite. This year, some soil on neighboring property that was polluted by tainted groundwater has been dug up and moved onto the Superfund site.
By early next year, cleanup plans call for more extensive work to begin, said Christine Amrhine, communications director for the Greenfield Environmental Multistate Trust LLC, a company that was court-appointed as a trustee to own hundreds of polluted former Kerr-McGee sites in 31 states, remediate the damage there and get the land back into productive use.