About 20 of the 44-acre Pine Yard at the old Kerr-McGee plant near 14 Avenue North could soon be in city hands and turned into a storm shelter and recreation center.
Greenfield Multistate Environmental Trust representatives updated about 30 attendees at the Dream Center on a redevelopment idea for the old railroad cross-tie plant property, which the EPA declared a Superfund site in 2015 due to creosote contamination in the ground.
The trust received $67 million in a court settlement for cleanup efforts at the site.
Claire Woods, director for environmental justice with the Greenfield Trust, and Community Advisory Group Executive Director Darren Leach said the portion of the Pine Yard could be donated to the city for a public redevelopment project.
The project would aim first to build the storm shelter and then a recreation center for sports, event spaces and even classrooms for adult education.
“It could give our kids something to do,” Leach said. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a facility in Columbus where we could actually accommodate our kids and their parents can get involved, where they can go and cheer for their children?”
Mayor Keith Gaskin told The Dispatch Greenfield Trust came to him and other city and county representatives earlier this month to pitch the idea. The city is working with the trust to iron out what a land gift would look like and how the city could find funds to build on it.
Gaskin said he and Leach will form a subcommittee to further discuss the idea before bringing it before the city council.
“There’s a lot of grant opportunities out there that we could go after to do something like this,” Gaskin said. “It’s not going to happen overnight, but the one area that we think we can focus on early is the storm shelter. We need that in Columbus desperately.
“What we’re trying to do is come up with a road map on how to redevelop this to get everything that this neighborhood needs in a site like that,” he added.
Pine Yard cleanup began in 2019, and by last year 30 acres had been completed and marketed for redevelopment.
The trust has held a series of redevelopment interest meetings with Columbus residents since 2018 to see what they want for private development there. Survey results presented to residents in 2022 showed the two most popular options were a health clinic or an adult education center.
Woods said the trust is not moving away from those suggestions for a private development but is adding to it with a public project idea.
She also said the new recreation center could garner interest from developers on the Pine Yard’s remaining 24 acres.
“In general, at our sites, public ownership is always on the table, and we look at private ownership as well,” Woods said. “You bring lung development, you bring more. There’s still very much a possibility for other private or public uses, like a health facility or some of the other priorities that the community identified.”
Ward 4 Councilman Pierre Beard, whose ward includes the Kerr-McGee site, said he is excited to see at least an idea for redevelopment coming forth since the cleanup efforts began.
“Kerr-McGee has been something that we’ve been talking about since I was a child,” Beard said. “To actually see that the trust is interested in giving (Columbus) some land to put some type of community center and storm shutters over there, that’s a big deal.”
Main plant site cleanup
The main plant site, where soil contamination was too deep for removal by excavation, still needs extensive cleanup, Woods said.
A feasibility study conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency to assess further cleanup has now been finalized and will be presented later this year, Project Manager Charles King said.
The study was supposed to be submitted by December 2022, but King said further findings at the site caused delays.
“Any time there’s a revision or a comment period for this, that requires some extra time, but now it’s finalized,” King said. “Now we’re working on a proposed plan.”
Woods said once cleanup at the main plant is finished, it will market the land for both public and private development.
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