Let this blight shine
Spitzer's brownfields cleanup plan - hatched in private - needs a rewrite

By Errol Louis
Daily News Columnist

First published in the Daily News, June 7th 2007, 4:00 AM

A bill introduced by Gov. Spitzer this week is a welcome step toward eliminating New York's brownfields - defunct factories, gas stations and other contaminated sites that sit unused for years because nobody wants the legal and economic headache of cleaning them up.

With admirable urgency, the governor is trying to get the Legislature to pass a law before the session ends next week.

But the Spitzer bill needs an overhaul - and the problem could have been avoided if the governor's staff had spent more time gathering public input.

That's a theme that reappears with distressing frequency these days. The new administration in Albany has been pushing reforms that community activists have sought for years, from an executive order to lower the cost of phoning prison inmates to the law signed yesterday that cracks down on human trafficking.

But in many cases, the changes are being designed by Spitzer's team in near-secrecy, with private calls to advocates replacing the more drawn-out process of rounding up broad public and political support.

The result, in the case of the brownfields bill, is a proposal that won't help people like Lucille McEwen, executive director of Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement, a nonprofit group.

The group, which has already built more than 2,000 units of housing in Harlem's Bradhurst area, has been trying for four years to create 60 units of senior housing in the Erbograph, a building on 146th St. near Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. that hasn't been used in more than 50 years. That's right, 50 years.

"We want to make sure we thoroughly clean up the site. We would never put our seniors at risk," says McEwen, who estimates it will cost $2 million to decontaminate the site and $16 million more to build the housing.

Formerly used as a film storage facility, the Erbograph is a classic brownfield: Nobody has touched the place because it's polluted with gasoline, lead and asbestos. But the state Department of Environmental Conservation recently denied cleanup money to McEwen's group, citing a maddening legal loophole.

Right now, properties can't get cleanup funds if the contamination wasn't caused by the original owner - and in the case of the Erbograph, it was the stone and dirt used to seal the abandoned building, not the original storage of film, that created the environmental hazard.

DEC's shortsighted decision, issued in October, didn't happen on Spitzer's watch - but the governor's bill doesn't change the rule that left McEwen out in the cold.

"Spitzer's bill is not going to help this project," says Mathy Stanislaus, co-director of New Partners for Community Revitalization, a nonprofit group dedicated to converting brownfields in low-income communities.

Stanislaus' group published a report last month calling for a reorganization of the state's brownfields programs so that developers like McEwen get a fair shot at cleanup dollars.

If we'd had a more transparent process, there might now be a consensus among legislators, community advocates and the media about how to fix the tangle of laws and rules on brownfields. Instead, we have to hope last-minute tinkering behind closed doors in Albany will do the trick.

If it doesn't, that polluted building on 146th St. will serve as a reminder of why even well-intentioned shortcuts around government openness usually don't work.