After a long, and sometimes contentious, public debate, the Council voted 5-1 to declare the city in recognition of a lower standard of carbon dioxide levels in the air.

<View resolution and supporting materials here.>

The new standard, 350 CO2 parts-per-million (ppm), was established by a team of scientists and environmentalists who argue that the ratio should be the upper limit for how much carbon dioxide is in the earth’s air. According to research published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2008, the current level worldwide stands at 387 ppm; about 40 percent higher than at the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

Although the recognition has no legal force nor costs, Councilman Jeff Ritterman, who introduced the resolution with the support of Mayor Gayle McLaughlin and Councilman Jim Rogers, said he hoped the resolution would raise awareness and spur public debate about climate change.

“I really wanted to do something on the local level,” Ritterman said. “We didn’t get much international leadership on this in Copenhagen,” Ritterman added, referring to the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Copenhagen, Denmark in December 2009.

The Council’s adoption of the measure, which includes an agreement to begin organizing community meetings to draw input for possible future local climate measures, comes amid intensifying public debate over the city’s largest employer, Chevron Corp.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown has proposed that the local Chevron refinery upgrade old infrastructure and improve energy efficiency in exchange for environmental groups’ dropping their objections to expansion in Chevron’s refining operations.

Dozens of community members spoke out during public debate, most in criticism of Chevron.

The lone dissent on the council for the air quality declaration came from Councilman Nat Bates, who at one point called his council colleagues “socialists.” He also accused McLaughlin, a member of the Green Party, and Ritterman of working to “run Chevron out of town.”

“This city is going to be a ghost town,” Bates said of what would happen if Chevron ceased local operations. Rumors that Chevron may consider closing its Richmond refinery have swirled of late. The refinery employs about 1,200 workers. Bates said Chevron pays the city nearly $35 million annually in total taxes.

McLaughlin and Councilman Tom Butt said they hoped the resolution would be part of a larger effort to establish Richmond as an environmentally-friendly city and a hot spot for green technology and industry. Butt said Richmond had recently been accepted to Green Cities California, a coalition of local governments calling for policies that support sustainable development.

On Jan. 27, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger toured a local solar panel manufacturing company to tout his statewide jobs growth plan.

Green technology, he told a gaggle of news cameras and reporters moments later, must be a main driver in breaking the state’s economic malaise.

“I am here because of the great technology that is being developed here,” Schwarzenegger said to a crowd that included a handful of SunPower employees. “But also because of job creation … my top priority is jobs, jobs, jobs.”

Thomas Werner, right, CEO of SunPower Systems.

Schwarzenegger held the news conference as part of a statewide push to tout his recently proposed jobs package. He spoke in a massive former Ford Motor Company Assembly Plant, the largest ever built on the West Coast.

Today the waterfront facility houses a number of smaller, cleaner enterprises, including SunPower and a popular eatery. The governor toured the solar panel manufacturing plant in part to talk about his recent proposal to cease all sales tax on green technology manufacturing equipment.

California is currently one of only three states that charges sales tax on purchases of green technology manufacturing equipment, Schwarzenegger said. He added that he has been traveling “up and down” the state stumping for elements of his economic plan.

Schwarzenegger chatted briefly with workers after the press conference.

“It doesn’t make us competitive,” Schwarzenegger said of charging sales tax on capital investments in what he called the “clean tech” sector.

The governor’s office issued a fact sheet that claimed his jobs program will “create or retain” 100,000 jobs statewide.

“It’s important to recognize that we cannot bring our economy back, we cannot bring our revenues back, if we don’t have jobs for all Californians,” Schwarzenegger said.

Schwarzenegger said the state was mired in a 12.4 percent unemployment rate, about 20 percent higher than the national average.

“We need jobs now,” Schwarzenegger said. The governor added that he expected the legislature to move quickly on his proposals. “I want to urge them that it has now been three weeks since I made my announcement of my job initiative.”

Gov. Schwarzenegger with Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin.

SunPower CEO Tom Werner, Silicon Valley Leadership Group representative Mike Mielke and California Conference of Carpenters Director Danny Curtin also spoke in favor of the governor’s jobs plan. The proposal has a number of other provisions, including: A $3,000 payment to employers who hire previously unemployed state residents; new job training funds; and an extension of the tax credit for new home buyers.

But it was the sales tax exemption that took center stage Wednesday. The industry leaders on hand said slashing the sales tax would stimulate investment.

“He gets that you can improve the environment, you can improve energy security and you can create jobs by encouraging the use of solar,” Werner said.

SunPower also produces solar panels in San Jose, Irvine and Chino.

Mayor Gayle McLaughlin introduced Schwarzenegger after her own brief presentation on Richmond. McLaughlin, a member of the Green Party, said the city was on the “cutting edge” of green technology, and mentioned a handful of other local companies producing environmentally-friendly, energy conserving products. She said the city is home to “30 to 40” green businesses.

“We know these businesses are helping transform Richmond economically and environmentally,” McLaughlin said.

According to the governor’s office, California is home to more than 10,000 clean technology companies that would benefit from the sales tax exemption.

Labor and Workforce Development Agency Secretary Victoria Bradshaw said clean technology producers will continue to outperform other industries.

“Between 1995 and 2008, clean tech jobs grew at 36 percent while the overall jobs only grew at 13 percent,” Bradshaw said. “And in the year 2007 to 2008, clean jobs continued to grow at 5 percent when overall jobs declined 1 percent. So we see a great future for California’s economy in the green and clean tech industry sectors.”

Whether that is still the case after November, when Mayor Gayle McLaughlin faces re-election, remains to be seen.

About 10 months out from the Nov. 2 election, the only thing that seems clear is that McLaughlin will run for re-election, but she’s leaving it at that for the time being.

“Right now I’m very focused on moving forward ongoing issues and policies in my day-to-day work as mayor,” McLaughlin wrote in an e-mail response to inquiries about the coming election.

Mayor McLaughlin, right, and Vice Mayor Maria Viramontes in November.

McLaughlin indicated in the same e-mail that an official announcement that she will seek re-election is coming sometime in the next few months.

As for who will challenge her, no one has officially declared. Rumors are rampant, however, about two current City Council members.

Nat Bates, the city’s most experienced politician and one with long-cultivated constituencies, has been privately talking with close friends and aides about making a run, according to sources who declined to speak on record. Speculation is also swirling about Vice Mayor Maria Viramontes, McLaughlin’s consistent political foe and a politician whose blunt personal style and work, particularly on children’s issues and in support of the city’s growing Latino community, could translate into a formidable candidacy.

Bates, who was reached by telephone while in Southern California last week, acknowledged the possibility that he could run for the office he held during two separate stints in the 1970s.

“It is too early to make a decision with respect to the upcoming election,” Bates said. “At this point, I’m undecided.”

Bates, who was first elected to the public office when Richmond voters sat him on the City Council in 1967, has developed strengths and liabilities over a career that has made him the longest-serving councilmember in the city’s history.

Bates supports an investment in facility upgrades at the local Chevron refinery, which McLaughlin opposed and is currently winding through court. He has also called for tougher policing strategies, such as sobriety checkpoints, a measure which has unsettled many city residents, particularly immigrant communities. Bates has also had rubs with election law. In 2005, he paid fines to the state Fair Political Practices Commission for failing to disclose contributions to his campaign.

Bates supports the Point Molate Casino project, as does Viramontes.

On Jan. 11, the City Council voted 4-3 to extend a developer’s deadline to produced a plan to develop an Indian gaming casino on the former Point Molate Naval Fuel Depot. Bates and Viramontes headed the narrow majority, with McLaughlin on the other side.

Bates, center, was first elected to Richmond City Council in 1967.

With three City Council seats also up for grabs in what are expected to be competitive races, some city leaders are reluctant to cast their lot in a particular direction at this early juncture.

Councilman Jim Rogers, who faces his own re-election battle this November, acknowledged that he and McLaughlin have frequently seen eye-to-eye, but declined to weigh in on the race.

“The mayor and I, we have our similarities, particularly on the issues involving Chevron and our schools … certainly overall more similarities than differences,” Rogers said. “But I’m not going to endorse, I have my own plate full.”

Viramontes, who did not return calls seeking comment, has strong support among the city’s Latino residents and has sat on the council since 2002. A fourth generation Richmond native, Viramontes frequently clashes with McLaughlin on the dais, leading some to believe the two harbor personal animus toward each other. She is seen by many as pro-business and pro-casino, a diametrically opposite foil to McLaughlin, who never wavers from her green credentials and uses phrases like “social justice” as often as a street-level activist.

But Viramontes also touts youth-related issues and community policing along with her pro-business stances.

McLaughlin, who came to the city from Chicago earlier in 2000, relied on significant support from both black and Latino communities in 2006, when she narrowly defeated the incumbent, Irma Anderson, by barely 300 votes.

Councilman Tom Butt said he’ll “probably” support McLaughlin for re-election.

“She thinks close to the way I do on most subjects,” Butt said. Both have been critical of Chevron Corp.

Viramontes and McLaughlin have been known to have sharp exchanges during public meetings.

But they have differences as well. McLaughlin voted against a $350,000 pool divider for the Plunge in Point Richmond, a project Butt adamantly supported.

Butt has written in his own e-newsletter about how Bates would complicate the race, possibly siphoning off sizable numbers of both McLaughlin and Viramontes’ supporters.

However, McLaughlin has generally performed consistent with the expectations that preceded her term. She has vociferously battled with Chevron Corp. over taxes, fees and pollution. She is also among the most well-traveled elected officials in the city, often being sighted at multiple community events in a given day, giving crowd-pleasing speeches at events ranging from homicide memorials to a small gathering last week protesting the possible closure of a local post office.

“Word on the street is that she maintains an electable popularity that may have even expanded since her razor-thin win” in 2006, Butt wrote on Jan. 10.

Which is why Mayor Gayle McLaughlin hails the establishment of a local nonprofit dedicated to cleaning, restoring and reusing urban parcels of land that lay dormant.

The new nonprofit, named Groundwork Richmond, will “operate in areas adversely affected by industrialization and within poor urban communities with significant numbers of brownfields,” McLaughlin said during a ceremony Monday at City Hall celebrating the completion of a feasibility study and strategic plan. The completion of the documents is a key step toward securing funding, she said.

Groundwork Richmond is part of a network of independent community ventures aimed at improving urban environments through local action by linking local people, business, government and other organizations, according to a program summary.

The Groundwork USA network works with the Environmental Protection Agency Brownfields Program and the National Park Service Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance Program. Brownfields are lands previously used for industrial purposes, which may contain hazardous residue.

The city has agreed to an annual contribution of $25,000 toward the nonprofit’s mission.

The initial focus of Groundwork Richmond will be areas within the city’s Iron Triangle, said Nicole Valentino, a community advocate within the Mayor’s Office.

“It’s one of the most negatively impacted areas of the city, in terms of toxic residues and land that needs to be remediated,” Valentino said. “And it suffers a high rate of poverty and high rate of crime.“

Within the Iron Triangle, and extending beyond it, the venture will focus on the Richmond Greenway, a trail project linking public transit and cutting through the heart of the city. The city’s Parks Department and local representatives of the National Park Service are also likely partners, according to the executive summary.

Valentino said a key component to the initiative will be the formation of a Green Team, a group of local youths who will work to renew unused and toxic parcels within the city’s urban core.

“The vision that we have is that the team would reforest areas, plan and develop urban tree canopies, work on building parks out of brownfields and learn leadership skills on the way,” Valentino said. “This will be a group of local young people who are trained to be stewards of the projects.”

Robert Parker and Archie Hall, avid fishermen who are both AC Transit bus drivers, were spending their day off trying out new fishing poles.

“A lot of the time, it’s just for sport. But if you catch a medium-size halibut, he’s going home,” said Parker, 40, a lifelong resident of Richmond.

Parker says he only eats about five fish caught from the bay each year because he knows that many contain high levels of mercury and other contaminants.

But eating fish caught from the Inner Harbor area may be particularly risky.

Long-banned pesticides — primarily DDT and dieldrin — still poison these waterways, even though the company that processed them has been bankrupt for over 40 years.

Twelve years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency removed sediment containing three tons of DDT from the site. But since then, repeated sampling of water, sediment and fish has found pesticide concentrations that could be harmful to the environment and to human health. Fifteen acres of marine sediment and five upland acres in the Inner Harbor remain a federal Superfund site.

Cleanup goal not met

“At the five-year review, we said it’s clear we haven’t met our cleanup goal,” said Sharon Lin, the EPA’s current project manager for the United Heckathorn Superfund site. “We did not achieve the remedy because we did not fully understand the contamination.”

The EPA is currently determining the need for a new cleanup plan, with a decision due in late 2010.

Fisherman Parker had no idea that there is a DDT-contaminated Superfund site less than a mile from where he cast his line. He’s not alone.

Dr. Jonathan Chevrier, who has extensively studied human exposure to DDT, said he had never heard of the site, just a few freeway exits from his job at UC Berkeley.

“I was really surprised . . . We tend to think that exposure to DDT and DDE is not a problem in the U.S. anymore,” said Dr. Chevrier, a post-doctoral scholar in epidemiology at Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

Torm Nompraseurt, a community organizer for the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), worked with the EPA at the time of the original cleanup to educate local Laotians about the dangers of eating pesticide-contaminated fish. Before receiving inquiries from Richmond Confidential, Nompraseurt did not know that the site was still contaminated either.

Andrew Lincoff was a part of the EPA subcontracted team that recently collected mussel and sediment samples from the Lauritzen Canal. (Photo by Leah Bartos)

Even at the time of the original cleanup, Nompraseurt said his group had a hard time getting people to stop fishing. (The California Department of Public Health warns that adults should eat no more than two fish per month caught anywhere in the San Francisco Bay.) He said people were skeptical that the fish could be toxic, since they were still alive to be caught. Some even thought the warnings were a capitalist conspiracy to get them to patronize markets. Perhaps more important, Nompraseurt said the fishing custom is a matter of economic survival.

“In a poor community, you don’t fish for fun. I know that,” said Nompraseurt, who came to Richmond as a Laotian refugee in 1975.

“In the Laotian community, from what I know, every single household goes fishing,” he added. “Our folk eat three times more than the state advisory. If you look at that in terms of risk, that means our folk have three times more risk.”

From industrial boom to toxic bust

United Heckathorn began formulating pesticides in 1947, back when Richmond was thriving from the industries that World War II brought. Most of those industries and jobs are now gone, but their legacy lives on in the pollution that they left behind.

United Heckathorn shut down all operations in 1966 and the site was abandoned, just a few years after the 1962 release of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s seminal work revealing the dangers of DDT. The pesticide was banned in the United States in 1972. It has since been banned in much of the world but it is still used in several African and Asian countries to protect people from malaria.

In 1980, the California Department of Health Services detected chlorinated pesticides and metals in soil samples from the United Heckathorn site, which they were inspecting as a part of their abandoned sites project. Five acres of land and about 15 acres of underwater sediment were designated a state Superfund site. The federal EPA took over in 1990 and put the site on the National Priority List, an inventory of hazardous waste sites that qualify for long-term cleanup financing under the Superfund law.

In the mid-1990s, subcontractors poured a concrete cap over four and a half acres of the land portion of the site — just south of Cutting Boulevard, extending to the Santa Fe Channel — and dredged about three tons of DDT from the Lauritzen and Parr canals.

The EPA’s 2008 fish sampling revealed that DDT concentrations in fish caught in the Lauritzen Canal ranged from 526 to 11,000 parts per billion. The EPA is aiming for DDT concentrations no higher than 5,000 parts per billion, to meet the limit set by the Food and Drug Administration.

Dangers of DDT

Researchers, including Dr. Chevrier at UC Berkeley, have found that consuming DDT may cause serious health problems. Scientists believe that most human DDT exposure occurs through consumption of contaminated food, Chevrier said.

The Levin-Richmond Terminal Corporation currently operates its shipping business from the former United Heckathorn site. (Photo by Leah Bartos)

Dr. Chevrier coauthored the Pine River Statement, a report synthesizing data from 494 papers about the human health consequences of DDT exposure, published in Environmental Health Perspectives this September.

It summarized original research correlating DDT measurements in blood levels with a range of health effects, including various cancers and damage to endocrine, neurological, and reproductive systems. The data show that children and pregnant women and their fetuses may be particularly vulnerable.

Even without knowing the actual levels of DDT in individual Richmond residents, Dr. Chevrier said, “For these people that are eating fish everyday, I would be concerned…based on what I know about levels of DDT.”

EPA still investigating

Sharon Lin, the EPA’s current project manager for the United Heckathorn site, worries that the chronic nature of DDT-related health conditions make people apathetic about the potential risks.

“When you have an acute health problem, it’s easier to communicate . . . People just get more angry about it,” Lin said.

Lin said that she wants to upgrade the existing fishing advisory and again get the word out to the community about the risks of eating fish from the harbor area. She added that community education and press coverage created public concern surrounding the initial cleanup project. That helped spur the agency to clean up the site quickly. Lin estimated that least 75 percent of the contamination was removed in the first cleanup, but this time around, there hasn’t been the same public outcry surrounding the remaining pollution.

“The initial cleanup decision from when we listed the site [was] in 1990 and then we did the cleanup in 1996, and that’s really speedy for EPA,” Lin said. “There [was] an urgency from the community to take the waste out and we felt compelled to respond.”

However, the persisting contamination may be partially a consequence of the quick cleanup.

Lin said that the cleanup crew was also somewhat derailed by unexpectedly finding 187 tons of salvage metals — presumably from the scrap metal yard adjacent to the site — that had to be removed.

A barge from Mason Dredging company along the west side of the Lauritzen Canal. (Photo by Leah Bartos)

“We did the best that we could. We were trying to find out what’s causing the high levels of contamination in the channels,” she said. “This time, we’re taking the time and we’re trying to do it right.”

In more recent years, the EPA has collected additional mussel tissue, water, and sediment samples, and has looked into a leaking storm drain to further examine the extent and potential sources of the contamination.

The EPA is currently preparing a focused feasibility study, which will reassess the risk to human and ecological health. Lin said she plans to have a decision on whether to require additional site cleanup by late 2010.

A right to fish?

Robert Knowles, District Nine regional representative for the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, said that while it’s important to remove the contaminated materials, it is also crucial that people heed the state’s warnings against eating local fish.

The California Department of Public Health warns that adults should eat no more than two fish per month caught anywhere in the San Francisco Bay.

“[The EPA] can do all those things, but it will take years for them to remove all the DDT in fish because it accumulates in them over time,” Knowles said. “So the only way to prevent exposure is to educate people about the contamination.”

However, some worry that the message is not getting through. Michael Kent, the Contra Costa County Hazardous Materials ombudsman, has worked with the EPA to educate local fishermen about the risks of eating harbor fish.

“I’ve gone down to the pier and talked to fishermen, and you get guys that just kind of laugh at you,” Kent said. “I’m not saying that’s reflective of everyone…but they’ve been eating fish for a long time and they might not be feeling the health effects.”

Some people, though, might not be getting the message at all. Kent said that his department has posted various warning signs near the Harbor Way fishing pier, but the warnings have been vandalized or stolen. He said his department hasn’t worked on the United Heckathorn site since 2004, when it last attempted to post a sign.

But with or without signs, Torm Nompraseurt, the Laotian organizer, said he’s angry that the Inner Harbor is still polluted over a decade after the major cleanup. He worries about the people who have been unknowingly eating pesticide-laden fish.

“Sometimes, putting a sign up doesn’t mean anything, unless you talk face-to-face about the impact of the chemicals,” Nompraseurt said.

“The state can’t control folks’ cultural consumption and the way of life,” he said, emphasizing that in the economic downturn, having the option to subsist on fish is even more important.

“That’s why we’re still fighting. People should have a right to fish.”

Click for Richmond Confidential’s original coverage of the United Heckathorn story.

Laotian Organizing Project (LOP) is an community organizing group set up in 1995 by Asian Pacific Environmental Network, an activist group in the Bay Area aiming to help Asian Pacific Islander communities seek environmental and social justice. The LOP aims to educate and train the Laotian community in Richmond to stand up and voice their concerns about the well being of their community.

The LOP’s most recent campaign is against the expansion of the Chevron refinery in Richmond. After a three-year campaign, the LOP and other activist groups eventually won the case and the court ordered Chevron to halt the project in June this year.

And they’re still working on the Chevron campaign, as the case has been brought back to court. The LOP aims to collect 1,000 postcards with signatures from the community by January to present to the Richmond City Council. By talking to people at supermarkets, parking lots and grocery stores, they collected 800 postcards since this September.

Speaking of the recent one-million donation from Chevron to five non-profit organizations in Richmond, one of the two staff organizers with the LOP, Torm Nompraseurt, 54, said it is insulting to him. “They had 20 billion profit last year and if they really want to help the Richmond community, they should have done more,” he said.

Richmond is home to thousands of Laotian war refugees whom arrived in the US from 1975 to the early 1990s. According to LOP, 10,000 Laotians currently live in West Contra Costa County. And, most of them are of low income. In LOP’s opinion this makes them vulnerable to social injustice.

Nompraseurt says he was the first Laotian settled in Richmond. He escaped from Laos before the Communist took over his country in 1975, and immigrated to the US as a refugee. Having worked in social services in Richmond for almost 30 years, he says he now knows every single Laotian family here.

South Asian immigrants from Laos and other South Asian countries, Nompraseurt said, are not used to participating in the political process, because they didn’t have a political culture comprable to that of the US.

“Because of their cultural background, people are scared to speak in front of the authorities,” Nompraseurt said. “On the other hand, they’re shy. People who speak for the first time, we can see, they were nervous and they were shaking.”

This is what the LOP has been striving to change.

The first successful change they brought about was a multi-lingual emergency warning system in Richmond after a fire in Chevron in 1999. The fire caused environmental and health hazard, yet at that time there was only one English-language warning system.

LOP then encouraged the Laotian community to campaign for a multi-lingual warning system by testifying at the Richmond City Council meeting, To prepare, the LOP invited people to house meetings before the council meeting and explained to them how they could achieve this goal.

They also taught people how to speak succinctly and tell their personal stories to move the city council. “We had to prep people several times before the meeting to make sure they were ready,” Nompraseurt said.

The warning system eventually got approved, which built the fame of the LOP in the community as well as in the city. And the Laotian community realized they could actually change policies.

Over the past ten years, the LOP has also organized campaigns against rent increases, and to establish a South Asian student advisory program at Richmond High school.

Through those campaigns, the Laotian community is more willing to participate in the political process now. “Most of our leaders are now sophisticated to talk about the issues and campaign on behalf of the community,” said Nompraseurt. Now the LOP has about 25 campaign leaders and a couple hundred of members.

The LOP also works on communication between older and younger generations as well. According to Sandy Saeteurn, 26, the other staff organizer with the LOP, they invite the Laotian women elders to teach gardening and sewing — activities essential to Laotian culture — to young Laotian girls.

“What’s sad is we’re losing our own culture. Through the project we adopt the American way while have our own culture preserved,” Saeteurn said. “We teach the seniors to learn how to vote and how to voice their opinions; and the youth learn from seniors our own culture. We’re seeking the balance between both generations.”

Although Nompraseurt has been encouraging people to speak for their own rights and participate in the political process, he himself doubts how political decisions are made. He thinks sometimes the process lasts too long and things might not change, despite of all their efforts.

“But we have to have people take part,” he said. “Because if people don’t get involved, it’ll get worse; if people are involved, you might get something out of it.”

The biggest achievement, Nompraseurt believes the LOP has, is “to make sure people understand that they can — not just understand—that they can fight against injustice policy.”

“We have done that in terms of Chevron. People said Chevron is too big to fight,” Nompraseurt said. “We said no. That was the process we needed to go through. And we won it.”

“There will probably be some consequences if the project doesn’t go forward,” said Bob Cheasty, the president of Citizens for East Shore Parks, which filed the lawsuit. The group is a coalition of local environmental organizations, any one of which could still try to derail the project even if a settlement is reached.

Citizens for East Shore Parks filed its first lawsuit against the City of Richmond in May 2005, less than one year after the city signed a deal that would turn over the nearly 400-acre property on the shores of the San Francisco Bay to developer Upstream Point Molate for $50 million. The lawsuit argued that the city should have completed a full environmental review before it signed the land disposition agreement with the developer. The city said that such a review was unnecessary, but in Jan. 2006 it agreed to a settlement that required an environmental impact statement be conducted under the California Environmental Quality Act before the city could approve the project.

But when the city made an additional agreement in 2008 that put the developer in charge of cleaning up hazardous materials on the former Navy fuel depot, Citizens for East Shore Parks struck back with another lawsuit. The suit, filed in January of this year, sought to invalidate this new agreement claiming it broke the terms of the original settlement. The suit argues that the proposed casino would violate the city’s general plan and state law.

Any waterfront property a city owns can be sold only to the state for the purposes of creating a public park under California Government Code 37351. The law does allow a city to sell shorefront land if the property can’t be used for a beach or public park, but the lawsuit claims the city did not determine Point Molate couldn’t be transformed into a park before the council agreed to sell it to Upstream.

When Citizens for East Shore Parks started talking to the Guidiville Band it discovered the tribe was willing to work with the group to resolve its concerns, said Cheasty.

“The Guidivilles turned out to have a commitment on their own to environmental stewardship,” said Cheasty. “They found our agenda and our interests to be something that they were very comfortable with.”

Cheasty would not disclose the terms of the tentative settlement, citing confidentiality agreements, but he did say that the talks are continuing.

“We’ve asked for what would be considered extraordinary mitigations,” said Cheasty. “We want to see an open shoreline from Crocket to San Jose, a pearl necklace of parks around the Bay.”

The city council is scheduled to meet Tuesday behind closed doors to discuss a possible settlement. Council member Jeff Ritterman told Richmond Confidential that Upstream intends to settle the suit by giving Citizens for East Shore Parks money to buy the North Richmond shoreline for an open space preserve.

While it appears that Citizens for East Shore Parks may be headed for a settlement, a spokeswoman for one of its member organizations said her group isn’t ready to throw in the towel.

“Of course we don’t agree with them, … lining up to get money from this casino project is taking a huge gamble,” said Laura Baker, the conservation committee chair for the East Bay Chapter of the California Native Plant Society. “There are many unknowns, there are a lot of moving parts to this deal that may or may not work. … There’s all kinds of ways this deal could go south,”

Baker said while she hasn’t been privy to the terms of the proposed settlement, she believes the agreement would involve a cash payout and the creation of a new board — with members from both the tribe and the environmental organization — that would decide how the money is spent.

“What has been lost in all of this is a real understanding of the unique value of Point Molate,” she said. “It has plants that are found no place else. It’s unique in terms of its climate (because) it sits in the rain shadow of Mount Tamalpais. This is an area that’s a treasure. It’s the crown jewel of the Richmond shoreline.”

Baker said she isn’t completely opposed to developing Point Molate, but that the scale of the casino proposal is environmentally unsound.

She said the developer’s plan to ferry gamblers between the casino and San Francisco could damage a delicate ecosystem off the Point Molate shore. The largest eel grass bed in the San Francisco Bay, which serves as a nursery for fish and shellfish, could be disrupted by the boat traffic, said Baker.

Even if Citizens for East Shore Parks agrees to settle, Baker said she’s been told by the group that there is a clause in the proposed agreement that would kill the deal if any “major environmental organization” continues to oppose the project.

“What was unusual was to put that provision — what I would call a poison pill — so that it would essentially dissolve if there were opposition,” said Baker. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. … You are taking a huge huge gamble (in) that you can’t control what another organization would do.”

She said its unclear if her chapter of the California Native Plant Society would qualify as a “major environmental organization,” but the board has decided it can’t go along with the deal in order to preserve a settlement.

Cheasty wouldn’t confirm that this “poison pill” is part of the tentative agreement, but he did say that the tribes might not be willing to commit to the concessions they’ve made if this settlement doesn’t placate the environmental opposition.

“A concern that the tribes have had is that they are willing to do a certain number of things based on their hope to be able to get their project done,” said Cheasty, who indicated that some of the organizations that make up his group support the settlement.

“We’re not going to be able to stop other environmental organizations if they choose not to do this,” he said.

Some parts of the trail are more scenic than others, and “Bay Trail” becomes a bit of a misnomer as you ride in bike lanes along Cutting Blvd. or Garrard Ave. where you lose sight of the water. The quality of the pavement also varies, and at some intersections the trail becomes a little difficult to navigate on wheels – if you’re biking, it’s best to dismount and act like a pedestrian. Walkers might also feel a little less safe along the stretches on Cutting and Garrard.

For group nature events and clean-ups along the trail, visit the website of the Trails for Richmond Action Committee at http://www.pointrichmond.com/baytrail/calendar.htm.

He’s standing on the edge of a paved trail that runs along the shore in Southern Richmond, where cyclists, joggers and bird-watchers often come to take in views of the San Francisco skyline.

He can’t get much closer to the birds, though. A chain-link fence encloses most of the marshlands, and metal signs warn passers-by to keep out.

Farther from the shore and the walking trail, beyond the marshes, workers in white jumpsuits are using weed-whackers to clear the brush that’s starting to grow through a white concrete sheet covering 30 acres of the lot. The cap is a quarter-inch thick and word is, it crunches under your feet like a thin sheet of ice. Under the cap lies the story of this area’s toxic past.

“It looks benign, you know,” says Sherry Padgett, shielding her eyes from the late-afternoon sun. Padgett works at a cabling shop on South 49th Street, across from this lot. From her second-story office, she can see across the entire site, over the marshes and out to the bay.

A real-estate development company called Cherokee-Simeon Ventures now owns the 85 acres that separate South 49th from the shores of the bay. When the developers bought the property in 2002, they named it Campus Bay. But the people who work around here – not to mention city officials, the Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Public Health, state Water Board, and Department of Toxic Substance Control – all call it the Zeneca site. Most everyone calls it a mess.

A TOXIC HISTORY

The problems here started miles away in a Sierra foothill mine.

The Stauffer Chemical Company bought the land in 1897 and made its business by trucking pyrite – fool’s gold – from its Sierra mine to Richmond to roast it down into sulfuric acid. In the 1950s, the company also started manufacturing chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

A view of the UC Richmond Field Station, as seen from the Bay Trail that runs along the southern edge of both the UC and Zeneca lots. Photo by Ian A. Stewart.

Making sulfuric acid obviously means creating waste. In this case, the byproduct is a highly acidic ash-like substance, called cinders. According to a history of the site prepared in 2001 by the Regional Water Quality Control Board, Stauffer for years used the cinders as landfill, dumping the waste against Stege Marsh on the east of its property, and on what is now the University of California’s Richmond Field Station, a research facility, on the west.

The cinders are mostly made up of pyrite, but include toxic metals like arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury, and selenium – all of which appear on the state-produced Prop. 65 list of chemicals known to cause cancer, birth defects, or reproductive harm.

By the time the Stauffer site finally closed down, the company had, through a series of mergers and acquisitions, formed into Zeneca, Inc., which has since merged into AstraZeneca, the world’s second-largest pharmaceutical manufacturer.

In 1997, as part of a company-wide reorganization, Zeneca shut down the Richmond site. The company ordered most of the buildings there – many of which stored chemicals and pesticides – razed. Only a few office buildings remain.

The next year, the state’s water board named the Stege Marsh a “high” priority on its list of the state’s most polluted hot-spots.

The water board ordered Zeneca to clean up the site, so the company hired a San Francisco-based environmental consultant called Levine and Fricke Recon to outline a clean-up plan. No strangers to Richmond, Levine and Fricke have coordinated similar remediation plans at Point Isabel and the inner harbor.

The $20 million plan, green-lighted by the water board in 2002, called for workers to dig up and load much of the contaminated soil into trucks, and take it to hazardous waste treatment facilities.

But it also – in a move activists would come to question the legality of – called for workers to excavate 300,000 cubic yards of the cinder-laced dirt from the southern end of the Zeneca property, and 50,000 cubic yards of soil from the adjacent UC field station, and mix it with ground-up limestone, aiming to neutralize its acidity. Once the soil was blended, workers spread it out over 30 acres, and “capped” it – covered it with a quarter-inch-thick top made of concrete and paper-mache. The cap is intended to repel rainwater, and keep the cinders from spreading out through the groundwater beneath.

According to a 2005 memo prepared by Levine and Fricke for the toxic substances department, the cap serves to “reduce infiltration, provide surface water and dust control, and prevent dermal contact.” The memo says the cap “will remain in place until the Site is redeveloped.”

NOT THAT SIMPLE

As the remediation work moved forward, people working in businesses around the harbor-front track began to grow skeptical of the clean-up. In 2004, a citizen group led by Padgett formed as the Richmond Southeast Shoreline Community Advisory Group to complain about the amount of dust being kicked up by the work. Some people worried, too, that the dust may contain toxic chemicals.

“I’d go out to sweep the parking lot, and it’d be different colors depending on what they were doing across the street,” Padgett said. “I knew it was bad when our white dumpster turned black.”

Padgett describes the long history of toxicity at the former Stauffer Chemical Company site. Padgett developed cancer during remediation work at the site, and suspects she was exposed to toxic chemicals in the air. Photo by Ian A. Stewart.

The department of toxic substances later stated in a report on health hazards at the site, that, “prior to 2005, air monitoring (if any) was not adequate to evaluate contaminant levels in dust.”

Padgett learned in late 2002 that she’d developed cancerous cartilage growths on her ribs and chest. Padgett suspects she was exposed to carcinogenic chemicals in the air during the clean-up, but acknowledges that it is impossible to link her cancer to any particular chemical from the Zeneca site. Nonetheless, her illness helped transform Padgett into the de facto leader of what has become a years-long fight.

Padgett and the citizen group complained to local government agencies that the water board wasn’t taking an active role in supervising the remediation work. The cause attracted a number of political allies, including State Sen. Loni Hancock, and together, in 2004, they forced the water board to cede its oversight duties at the Zeneca site to the Department of Toxic Substance Control.

The toxic substance department set out to review exactly what was done during the clean-up, and how. According to Barbara Cook, site supervisor for the Zeneca area, the department found what it called “major data gaps” about what kinds of toxins were still in the ground, and where.

“One of the problems was that (Zeneca) did a lot of this as a piecemeal approach,” Cook said. “So we didn’t understand where everything was at. So first we had to define the problem – what chemicals are there, and what impacts are there.”

The department required Zeneca to hire a team of geologists to test the soil and groundwater across the entire site. That testing, the results of which were released in 2006, ultimately showed that Lot 1 – which isn’t under the cap – contained unusually high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls and three Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs): Tetrachloroethylene, trichloroethylene, and vinyl chloride.  Those chemicals are all included on the Prop. 65 list and are known to cause cancer.

The toxic substances department also looked back at the legality of the clean-up work, and in 2007, hit Zeneca and its neighbor, the University of California, with a list of clean-up-related violations. The department found that the two parties broke the law during by trucking hazardous material across their property lines, handling hazardous material without proper permits, and a host of other charges, mostly related to how workers transported soil from the university’s field station onto the Zeneca property to bury under the cap.

In June of this year, the department announced a fine of $225,000 for Zeneca, and $285,000 against the university. That money was split evenly between the toxic substances unit and a green-collar, city-run job-training program called RichmondBUILD.

The fines angered the Community Advisory Group, which includes Richmond’s mayor, Gayle McLaughlan. As the group’s president, Dan Schwab, put it, “it was a slap on the wrist.”

Peter Weiner, a real estate lawyer for the Paul Hastings Law Firm in San Francisco, who specializes in “brownfield” development, has been working with the community group pro bono. Weiner, too, called the department’s fines mild.

“Certainly the illegal disposal of hazardous waste is usually accompanied by larger civil penalties, or criminal prosecution,” Weiner said. “As a sophisticated company, (Zeneca) is supposed to know the law.”

According to a toxic substances department spokesperson, the agency is unlikely to adjust the fines, though, regardless of public opinion.

“(The department) evaluated the case on its merits,” spokeswoman Carol Northrup wrote in an email to Richmond Confidential. “The case is closed and will not be re-opened. However, nothing in that enforcement action resolves the parties’ liability and responsibility for continued site clean-up.”

AstraZeneca, when asked for comment, issued a statement on the June settlement:

“We are pleased to settle this matter on behalf of Zeneca, our predecessor company,” company spokeswoman Laura Woodin said, “and we believe the RichmondBUILD program will provide an invaluable mark on the community through the funds we have provided.”

Representatives from the UC field station did not return calls seeking comment.

The citizen group intends to meet Nov. 12 with the head of enforcement for the toxic substance control, Gale Filter, to grill the department about the fines.

IT ISN’T JUST HERE

Padgett pointed to Richmond’s demographics as one of the reasons the Zeneca clean-up, which is just one of several such projects around the city, has been slow to gain momentum.

The lot is fenced off from the corner of Seaport Avenue and South 49th Street, in the harbor-front business tract. Photo by Ian A. Stewart.

“If this had happened in my neighborhood in Danville, are you kidding?” she said. “It’d be straightened out by now. But this community has so much on its plate to just get up in the morning and put food on the table, their focus is on survival.”

Schwab, the citizen group president, said manufacturers have been able to get away with polluting the city’s land and waters in part because of Richmond’s historic lack of community activism, as opposed to cities like Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco, that have a strong history of environmental awareness.

The Zeneca site is only one of Richmond’s toxic hot-spots. According to the state’s Environmental Protection Agency Web site, the city is home to more than 20 active, state- or federally-monitored hazardous clean-up sites. Nearly all of them are along the city’s 32-mile coastline. Six toxic sites are located in the roughly two miles between Point Isabel, a popular park for dog-walkers, and the inner harbor.

“Richmond is sort of California’s version of a Rustbelt city,” Schwab said. “It’s like a world-class toxic waste site.”

NOT OVER YET

The Zeneca lot is now owned by the real-estate development partnership Cherokee-Simeon Ventures, which purchased the land in 2002. The developers once proposed building a 13-story apartment high-rise there, but that plan stalled out after word got out that the building would feature giant fans on the first floor to blow away the toxic vapors emanating up through the soil beneath.

McLaughlan, the city’s mayor, said she thinks it could be a long time before there’s any sort of construction there at all.

“I think it will be decades before the site is clean,” McLaughlan said in an email. “I most definitely think it should not be zoned as residential. The risk to future residents would be enormous, and the liability for the city would be enormous as well.”

McLaughlan added that she would oppose any plan that did not include doing away with the capped waste by trucking it to a hazardous waste treatment facility.

In March, the state’s Department of Public Health released a study that determined the site poses no immediate threat to the public, so long as it remains empty.

The site’s owners say they’ve yet to settle on what to do with the property. “We’re just considering our options based on the clean-up,” said Tom Kambe, a representative for Brooks Street, a real estate firm that’s working with the developers. “It’ll be market-dictated, and this is a good market.”

Kambe said the developers haven’t taken out any development applications with the city. They’ve released a draft “remedial action plan” for cleaning up the site, but it won’t be completed until 2010, at the earliest.

So with no real conclusion in sight, the lot sits vacant, save for the birds and animals in the marsh and the occasional workers inspecting the huge white cap. Meanwhile, the metal signs on the chain-link fence warning of pollution are starting to rust.

Rios, who also serves as the vice president for the 23rd Street Merchant’s Association, hopes improvements on 23rd Street will benefit Richmond’s Hispanic community as a whole.

Rios, 47, immigrated from Mexico in 1979. He now lives in Richmond with his family.