Restoration grant will subsidize public walkway and park overlooking falls
ITHACA — The City of Ithaca has received additional state funding to clean up lead and other contamination at the former Ithaca Gun factory.
The State Department of Environmental Conservation has announced that the city will receive $700,200 to cover approximately 90 percent of the estimated cost of investigation and remediation for the planned public walkway and Ithaca Falls Overlook Park — which will provide a view that has been closed to the public for more than 100 years.
The money comes from the state's Environmental Restoration Program, as part of the 1996 Clean Water/Clean Air Bond Act.
The city has already received a $2.3 million Restore NY grant to demolish the former gun factory, which is heavily contaminated with lead and asbestos.
Developer Frost Travis and land owner Wally Diehl plan to rebuild the site into 33 high-end condominiums and to donate a piece of land to the city for a handicap-accessible walkway leading to an overlook of Ithaca Falls.
The DEC grant, announced late Thursday, will pay for remediation on the land that will be donated to the city.
Mayor Carolyn Peterson said the city has been working on rehabilitating the factory site for many years and that she has personally been lobbying state officials, including the governor's office, for months to secure this funding.
“We're very pleased to receive this money for the public component of the cleanup of the walkway that helps us really put together the complete vision for that site,” Peterson said. “Removing the building, remediating the site under the building, constructing new homes, and remediating and cleaning up a public walkway and a public park area, making, hopefully in a few years, a beautiful rehabilitation of the former gun company site.”
History
The dilapidated building on Ithaca's East Hill, with its high fencing, colorful graffiti and boarded-up windows, gives no indication of the factory's past or the pride with which its workers once made world-renowned shotguns.
“It was the Cadillac if not the Porsche of guns,” said Mary Ellen Schramm, who worked at Ithaca Gun for six or seven years, starting in the mid 1960s. “Most of the people that worked there either were married to hunters or were hunters themselves. They knew about guns.”
Schramm said her father purchased an Ithaca gun in 1947 that her son still uses it occasionally for hunting.
“It's a very reliable gun,” she said.
Ithaca Gun began in 1883 and in 1937 began producing its well-known Model 37, according to the Ithaca Gun Company Web site. For a short time during World War II, the company also produced pistols, but its primary products were shotguns and rifle barrels, Schramm said.
“They called it ‘The Deerslayer barrel,'” she said.
People from all over the country would show up at the factory and ask for tours, she said. The response was always the same: “‘Oh sure, come on in.'”
Schramm said she herself would often spend lunch hours watching the craftspeople who engraved things such as pheasants, flying ducks and decorative patterns onto receivers and stocks.
The company was sold in 1967 to a Colorado company that would later become General Recreation Inc.
That's when things started going downhill, Schramm said.
“We called them the Colorado mafia,” she said. “They just came in and said, ‘We don't care how you did it, we're here to make money and we don't care that the quality is going out the door.'”
The factory wasn't unionized, and some people were let go just before their retirement dates so the newly acquired company wouldn't have to pay retirement benefits, Schramm said.
The company has been sold and moved operations several times since then. Ithaca Gun Company still produces and repairs guns in Upper Sandusky, Ohio.
The Ithaca factory closed in 1988.
Cleanups
But the environmental contamination from the factory operations remains.
The DEC's Environmental Site Remediation Database indicates that unknown quantities of lead, vinyl chloride, benzene and trichloroethylene (TCE) were disposed of at the site.
The primary contamination concern at the site is lead.
According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, exposure to high levels of lead may cause irreversible neurological damage and renal disease, and may affect cardiovascular and reproductive functioning. Even at low levels, lead exposure can affect children's brain development.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency undertook a $4.8 million cleanup at Ithaca Gun between 2002 and 2004 but left some areas heavily contaminated.
Two sets of testing in 2006, one by The Ithaca Journal and Toxics Targeting and another by a Cornell University student, found levels of lead and arsenic hundreds of times higher than the EPA's established cleanup goals.
Groundwater testing last fall also found TCE at two of three sample locations.
The state's groundwater standard is 5 parts per billion. One location between the factory and the smokestack was 152 ppb; one location near the smokestack was 98 ppb.
The $700,200 grant announced Friday pays only for remediation of the proposed public walkway and park. The grant requires a local match of 10 percent, but the local portion will be paid by the developers. If environmental investigation reveals that contamination has spread off the site, for example, down into soil near Fall Creek, the state will pay 100 percent of cleanup costs.
The $2.3 million Restore NY grant will pay for remediation of asbestos and lead in the gun factory demolition. Additional remediation costs on the private property must be paid for by property owner Wally Diehl and his Fall Creek Redevelopment LLP.
Because the EPA cleanup cost almost $5 million and did not complete the job, Peterson said she is aware that cleanup costs may well go over the roughly $700,000 awarded by the state.
But by accepting the city's application, the state indemnifies the city and takes responsibility for any future claims related to cleanup on that land, according to city and state officials.
When former governor Eliot Spitzer announced the Restore NY funding in January, he said “publicly and privately that this is a commitment by the state to get this site cleaned up,” Peterson said.
The DEC is restructuring the way it allocates remediation funds, so additional funding could be available through a different program if the state runs out of funds in its ERP program, Peterson said.
“This is a partnership with the state of New York, and I don't believe we will be left with a half-finished project,” she said.
Community Advisory Group
In part because of community concern to see that the site will be cleaned properly, the DEC has established a Community Advisory Group “to provide a way for members of the community to present and discuss their needs and concerns related to the site investigation and cleanup process,” according to a DEC press release.
The group “is intended to provide a communication forum through which a broad and diverse sample of community interests is represented,” according to the release.
Members are still being appointed to the group, Peterson said, but initial participants are Gerald Hutchison Cox, Mark Finkelstein, Walter Hang, Kathy Luz Herrera, Lisa Sanfilippo, Charles Izzo and Sarah Steuteville.
Cox is a member of the city's Natural Areas Commission.
Hang is president of Toxics Targeting and has a “vast knowledge” of environmental cleanups, Peterson said.
Luz Herrera is a Tompkins County legislator and Fall Creek resident.
Finkelstein owns Gun Hill apartments and is a former owner of the Ithaca Gun property.
Sanfilippo and Izzo live in Fall Creek.
Steuteville lives in Fall Creek, is a former member of the Natural Areas Commission and was involved in revegetation on the areas near Ithaca Gun remediated by the EPA.
Developer Travis said he's “going to pay close attention” to the group's comments.
“The community's voice is really important in this whole project. If the community didn't approve of it, it wouldn't happen,” he said.
Steuteville said her interest in the group is “cleanup and beyond.”
Redevelopment and cleanup at Ithaca Gun create a great opportunity to figure out how to improve public access and awareness of Fall Creek, Steuteville said — from above and below.
This could include better public access to the creek, including potentially some connection to the Cayuga Waterfront Trail, she said.
“I think the excitement is, ‘Yes we have to make really good due diligence with cleanup, make sure it's safe for our neighborhood,'” Steuteville said. “And then I think we have a really great opportunity to say, ‘Where do we want to go?'”
