A simple plan aimed to engage citizens in shaping a redevelopment plan for the old Kerr-McGee plant site backfired Thursday night in the Sim Scott Park Community Center.
It included moving the few dozen residents present through five stations. In the first, they were asked to place colored dots on a map representing where they “live, work, shop and play.” Subsequent stations included a survey of what participants would like to see developed at the old plant site, a place to draw what they believed to be the borders of their neighborhood, one to write about a memorable moment in their neighborhood and stick it on a map and lastly, a booth where they were asked to illustrate their ideas for the old Kerr-McGee land “through drawing or coloring.”
Far from engaging the citizens in the process, Thursday’s plan deeply offended most of them, and they voiced their frustrations.
“You want us to walk through here like mice through a cheese room, and then you want to tell us what we ate,” Rev. James E. Samuel Sr. told event organizers, as waves of “amens” from others in the crowd accompanied his outrage. “Don’t assume I have a lower intellect than you. I’m smarter than I look. … Show us some respect.”
Ultimately, representatives of Orion Planning and Design and the Mississippi State Carl Small Town Center scrapped all but the survey — forgoing the rest of what Samuel called their “path of puzzles” — as they scrambled to salvage what they could from a well-intended meeting gone awry.
After a little more than an hour, organizers collected the surveys and cut their losses, announcing plans for a follow-up meeting in May where they promised to be prepared with something more practical for their audience.
“You never know what type of engagement you’ll get from a community,” said Leah Kemp, director of the Carl Small Town Center who has worked with community revitalization projects all over the state. “The goal (Thursday) was to get more personalized input from everybody. We just need to find another way to do that.”
Redevelopment process
The Greenfield Environmental Trust Group began overseeing a $5.5 billion court settlement in 2011 designated to clean up and reclaim more than 400 Kerr-McGee sites in 24 states. The Trust hired Orion and the Carl Small Town Center (part of the MSU School of Architecture) to facilitate redevelopment at the Columbus site at Martin Luther King Drive and 14th Avenue North.
Columbus received $68 million for environmental action around its former Kerr-McGee location, where the company and its successor, Tronox, used creosote to treat the railroad cross ties produced at the plant from 1928-2003. Creosote is a chemical used to preserve wood that, according to the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, can cause skin and eye irritation, stomach pains, liver or kidney problems and possibly cancer.
Many Kerr-McGee employees in Columbus, along with residents in surrounding neighborhoods, developed health problems linked to creosote exposure.
The redevelopment process will run concurrently with site cleanup, also expected to start this year, according to Greenfield Director of Environmental Programs Lauri Gorton.
Once the site is cleaned, the Trust wants to prepare it for private development. In the meantime, the Trust hopes to use community input as well as a market study to determine the most appropriate and viable options for the future of the site.
Gorton said she hopes to see a master plan for redevelopment crafted this year that the Trust can begin marketing to suitors as soon as the site is ready.
“This takes time. … We didn’t want to wait until the cleanup process was over to start this process,” Gorton said of the redevelopment plan. “Then we’d be a few more years out (for completing redevelopment).”
The Trust’s beneficiaries are the Environmental Protection Agency and the states it represents, meaning EPA and the state of Mississippi must approve any development at the Columbus site.
Gorton spent much of Thursday’s meeting trying to diffuse the crowd’s dissatisfaction with the planned presentation.
“I assure you we are very sincere,” she told those who attended. “Our intention was to stimulate some input. … If this doesn’t work for you, help me understand how we can help make sure (the redevelopment) is what you want there.”
A few ideas
Ward 5 Councilman Stephen Jones, who attended Thursday’s meeting and represents many of the residents in the neighborhoods surrounding the Kerr-McGee site, said he would like to see a free clinic included as part of the redevelopment.
“That would help a whole lot of people, especially all those people who were affected (by the creosote),” Jones said.
Leon Hines, who worked for Kerr-McGee for 23 years and said the creosote negatively affected his health, is hoping the redevelopment brings an environmentally friendly economic driver.
“I’d like to see solar panels or a solar farm,” Hines said. “Something to create jobs.”
Also secretary of the Memphis Town Community Action Group that has met monthly with Greenfield Trust representatives for the last several years, Hines said he wasn’t offended by Thursday’s planned program.
He said Trust representatives had patiently and thoroughly answered questions since 2011 at those community action meetings — held the fourth Tuesday each month at 6 p.m. in the Municipal Complex. Unfortunately, he said, many of the people at Sim Scott Park on Thursday had been to few, if any, of those meetings and were not up to speed on the issues.
“I’ve been there since this started,” Hines said, adding a plug for the Greenfield Trust.
“They’re for real.”
Site cleanup
Gorton said the years-long process to mitigate creosote at the Kerr-McGee site is progressing as quickly as possible.
She expects the EPA to soon approve a plan to start cleaning up the “Pine Yard” along the railroad tracks north of the main plant site. That cleanup — which she said would involve digging up and disposing contaminated soil and replacing it with new soil — should be completed this year.
From there, Gorton said, EPA will need to approve a plan to clean the actual plant site so work can begin in 2019 or 2020.
Last year, Greenfield, in conjunction with the city of Columbus and environmental agencies, completed a three-month, $2.8 million project filling a ditch along Seventh Avenue from Maranatha Faith Center to Propst Park. In 2015, it also oversaw the completion of a $1.3 million project filling in a ditch along 14th Avenue and widening the road to build a center turn lane.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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