Tainted land to get $10M cleanup

A property that has long been among Ottawa's most polluted sites is slated to be cleaned up and turned into a shopping plaza.

The land at 300 West Hunt Club Road once served as a Texaco terminal and then a site for Coastal Canada Petroleum, and had oil leak or poured into it for decades.

With financial help from the city, Trinity Development Group plans to turn the vacant and vandalized lots into a retail plaza anchored by a 140,000-square-foot Lowe's home-improvement outlet.

"It's ugly to look at, the ground is toxic," said Keith Egli, the councillor for the local ward, Knoxdale-Merivale. "It's going to create jobs for the ward, it's going to increase tax revenue for the city. So it's a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned."

The owners of so-called brownfield sites used to be under no obligation to clean them up, as long as the contaminants didn't spread to adjacent properties. After Texaco moved on, subsequent owners also left the Hunt Club Road lot undeveloped because it was cheaper to just pay the minimal property taxes.

As an incentive to get such sites redeveloped, the city put in place a program to help cover the costs. Under Ottawa's brownfield rehabilitation scheme, the municipality pays for up to half the price of cleanup via property tax rebates spread out over several years.

Trinity Development Group has filed an application under the program for the former Texaco land, which is expected to cost $10 million to tidy half of which Ottawa would pay.

'Win-win'

"This is kind of a win-win situation, in that it allows the developer to have access to some money to help him clean up the site and it allows the city to actually use money that they would never have gotten before to help assist the developer to clean up the site and actually make additional money in terms of tax revenues on that site," said Richard Buchanan, a program manager with the city.

The developer's plan calls for 360,000 square feet of total retail space and 1,475 parking spots spread over a roughly 11.5-hectare area.

Trinity's website says the plaza will open in the fall, but digging up and restoring the landwill almost certainly take longer. The site's northwest corner held a bulk fuel storage depot from 1953 to 2002, and the soil and groundwater are contaminated with petroleum products, according to a 2008 environmental assessment that also found higher-than-permitted levels of polyhalogenated compounds. Some neighbouring lots are also tainted.