Anderson, Ind. was once a hub of General Motors manufacturing. Now the GM bankruptcy could stick the city with automaker's environmental cleanup bills.
By Kimberly Hirai and Jeff Gillies
Jan. 20, 2010
Editors note: This is part two of a three-day series on the environmental implications of GM’s bankruptcy.
The bankrupt shell of General Motors could dodge environmental cleanup costs for dozens of properties that the automaker polluted but doesn’t own.
Motors Liquidation Co. — the bundle of old GM debt and real estate that the automaker abandoned though bankruptcy — will clean up polluted property it inherited from GM with part of a $1.17 billion loan from the U.S. and Canadian governments.
State and federal environmental officials said that leaves them with two types of sites that need millions of dollars for cleanup but won’t get a crack at that money:
- Fifty landfills and other Superfund sites where GM dumped hazardous waste but never owned the property
- Former factory sites that GM polluted before donating them to communities for redevelopment
These are cleanups that the automaker would have at least contributed to if it had not gone bankrupt.
Donated GM land may now be a public liability
They are sites like several properties that in the early 2000s GM donated to Anderson, Ind., a city once home to 30 GM plants. Now the plants are gone.
Paul McConnell was an engineer with GM in Anderson for 30 years until 1997 when he was transferred to a plant closure group.
“The next 10 years, I tore down GM plants,” he said. “So people didn’t like to see me come into the plant.”
Plant demolition comes with plenty of environmental safeguards, he said. The city accepted GM’s land donation under the condition that GM continue paying for pollution cleanup and monitoring. The arrangement stuck until May 2009.
That’s when the automaker’s bankruptcy changed everything.
Pollution monitoring stopped, said Gary McKinney, Anderson’s brownfields redevelopment coordinator. Motors Liquidation argued to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that it shouldn’t have to clean up the sites because it doesn’t own them.
The pollution on the properties isn’t a public health hazard, McKinney said. It doesn’t threaten drinking water and people are kept away from the sites. But it needs to be cleaned up before the city can sell the properties to a developer and give the land another shot at economic productivity.
Both Anderson and Indiana’s state environmental agency filed claims for millions of dollars worth of cleanup costs in the city, bankruptcy court records show.
McKinney doesn’t know how Anderson’s land donation agreement will hold up in bankruptcy court. That’s up to Judge Robert Gerber, who presides over the GM bankruptcy case in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court Southern District of New York.
“We are presently preparing everything thinking he will not rule in our favor on that,” McKinney said. “Our first step is to file a claim and show that we do have those properties.”
Landfill cleanups won’t get GM funds
In the other category of polluted sites harmed by the bankruptcy, Motors Liquidation has stopped paying for cleanup at dozens of abandoned landfills across the country where GM once dumped hazardous waste.
Most of these sites fall under the federal Superfund program, which identifies dumpers responsible for abandoned waste and holds them accountable for cleanup costs.
The U.S. government filed a claim in the bankruptcy on behalf of the EPA and other federal environmental and wildlife agencies. It seeks GM’s share of nearly $2 billion worth of cleanup at 50 sites across the country.
How much of that would have come from GM isn’t clear: some of the sites have more than 100 other polluters contributing to an environmental fix, and others have fewer than 10.
And at “no more than half a dozen” of those sites, GM was the only identifiable dumper, said Joe Dufficy, chief of the EPA Region 5 brownfield and superfund reuse section.
One of those sites is the Garland Road Landfill in West Milton, Ohio, said Joe Smindak, the site’s coordinator for the Ohio EPA’s emergency and remedial response division.
GM paid for an emergency cleanup there from 1994 to 1997 that included removing 13,000 drums of waste and treating 14,000 tons of contaminated soil. It will take another $5 million to $16 million to finish the job there, according to court documents.
The federal EPA would use that to cover up the landfill and stabilize a nearby riverbank. When a site is 15 acres and 25 feet deep, you can’t dig it up and remove contamination, Smindak said.
A cleanup tab that GM would have once picked up will now likely fall to taxpayers.
“Unfortunately, at least for the time being, it will be federal dollars,” he said.