04/13/2007

Polluted park to remain closed

East Park near Bay Harbor resort may not reopen until '09

By CRAIG McCOOL

cmccool@record-eagle.com

PETOSKEY — A Lake Michigan park near the Bay Harbor resort will remain closed, at minimum, through two more summer seasons.

Environmental regulators told Resort Township officials this week that East Park will not reopen this year or next, though they cautiously allowed that residents may have their park back in 2009.

"That's assuming that everything goes well, that there's no hitches,” said Diana Mally, the federal Environmental Protection Agency official overseeing the shoreline cleanup at the Bay Harbor resort and the adjacent park. "I would say that's on the optimistic side.”

Township board members were disappointed, but not shocked.

"I wasn't totally surprised,” said township supervisor Robert Wheaton. "The last thing we had heard was in 2008. It just keeps going out and out and out.”

CMS Energy Corp., a initial financing partner in the posh resort, is charged with addressing contamination leftover from the land's former use as a cement quarry and plant. East Park is the only public property involved in the cleanup, now projected to cost the company $93 million.

Township officials this week declined to extend CMS' East Park property access agreement, which expires in May, choosing instead to table the matter until their next meeting.

"I think we need to discuss something about reimbursement for use of that park,” township clerk Lucy Eppler said.

Wheaton said the township hired environmental lawyers to monitor the cleanup, as well as engineering firms to draft reconfigured park plans, though he didn't have a total figure at hand.

"CMS has said that they'll make it right. Maybe we'll have to add it up and give them a bill,” he said.

Company spokesman Tim Petrosky told township officials that, in East Park, CMS hopes to install a series of "diversion” wells above the capped areas of contaminated soil to prevent water from flowing unchecked through the site, a plan that has yet to be approved by the EPA.

Meanwhile, CMS is preparing this spring to build a wastewater plant on land near the park to treat water from a buried collection system already installed along the shoreline. Currently, contaminated water collected with that system is trucked away. Some goes to a septage treatment plant in Grand Traverse County, some to deep injection wells east of Gaylord.

Once the new plant is up and running, CMS officials hope to treat the water on site, then release it into Lake Michigan. The company has applied for a necessary permit from the DEQ to allow that strategy, Petrosky said.

The state will set public hearings on the permit and no decision is likely before June or July, said Robert Wagner, head of the DEQ's remediation offices in Gaylord.

Alvin Lam, with the DEQ's water quality division in Lansing, said the state has not had time to review the discharge permit application, which was submitted April 6. Public hearings on the permit could be scheduled, Lam said.

"Normally, we would have to have people request a hearing before we schedule one, but because there's a lot of interest in this project, we may schedule one” without a request, he said.