A consulting firm that Naugatuck hired to assess a multi-acre riverfront property in the downtown — which borough officials hope to redevelop as part of the Renaissance Place project — determined there was both contaminates and buried rubble in the soil.
Glen Stefaniak, a licensed environmental professional from AKRF, gave a presentation before the Board of Mayor and Burgesses on Tuesday on the Parcel B property, a large parking lot owned by the General DataComm Company that sits between Water Street and the Naugatuck River.
The land is part of Naugatuck's Reinassance Place project, a multi-million dollar public-private venture to redevelop the borough to attract business and residents.
The property, where manufacturing buildings stood for over a century until recent years, doesn’t have any buried waste or drums beneath the land, Stefaniak said. Although the firm did determine there it found brick, wood and concrete under it as well as some ash, he said.
“As it looks now, when we get all the data back, really the two areas we’re looking at is area of ash around this pump house, where we found some high levels of lead limited to that area,” Stefaniak said, pointing to the northern part of the parcel on a map. “And the small petroleum impacted area around former benzene storage area.”
The assessment, and the public hearing, was part of a $200,000 grant the borough obtained from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. AKRF assessed the viability of the soil using certain soil bearing techniques and exploratory test pits.
The assessment isn’t done yet, Stefaniak said, but once its finished the company will be able to determine what it would cost to clean up Parcel B so it can be redeveloped. This is what the borough is doing now, spending $1.7 million in grants to remediate the Parcel C acreage at the corner of Maple and Water streets.
The borough doesn’t have a site plan for Parcel B, although there are drawings that were drafted several years ago, Mayor Robert A. Mezzo said.
“I think one of the lessons learned from Parcel C is trying to do a remediation project without a site plan is not efficient,” Mezzo said.
But once the developer for the project, Alex Conroy, decides what will happen the borough would likely determine a site plan for a remediation of the property, Mezzo said.
