City: No delay on box factory cleanup

City leaders said Wednesday they’re not putting off the cleanup of a polluted parcel downtown.
The federal stimulus cash that City Hall plans to tap to help clean up a contaminated former box factory site downtown don’t require the work to be done for nearly three more years.
But city officials said Wednesday they expect to be finished long before the deadline.
By springtime, the city should be able to begin to do “the dig and haul” that would remove most of the polluted soil on the School Street parcel, according to Robyn Bugbee, the city’s grants administrator.
Bugbee said that neither the city nor the Environmental Protection Agency has any desire “to sit around” and wait to get the work done.
To meet the federal guidelines governing a $345,000 brownfields grant is that the remediation of the polluted site has to be completed by August 2012.
That doesn’t mean that a proposed municipal parking lot on the site will be finished, however. The lot requires additional funding. There is no set timetable to complete it, officials said.

More to come later.

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