It’s time for Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration to take the lead in delivering a promised park at the mouth of the Calumet River.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been using the site as a “confined disposal facility” for contaminated material dredged up from the Calumet Harbor and Calumet River since the early 1980s. Once the site was filled, it was supposed to be converted into parkland, linking Calumet Park on the south to Steelworkers Park on the north. People swim at Calumet Beach just a few hundred feet from the disposal facility.
But the Army Corps — to keep shipping channels open — wants to keep dredging up sediment tainted with mercury, PCBs, lead and other toxins and storing it at the confined disposal facility until the site is 25 feet higher than the height originally agreed to. A hill that size would limit the ways the land could be reused as a park.
The Army Corps plan does not conform with the original state law that said the roughly 45 acres of reclaimed land would become a park as long ago as the mid-1990s.
In a federal lawsuit filed by environmental groups last March to stop the Army Corps plan, briefs are due by the middle of May, following a delay requested late last Thursday by the U.S. Department of Justice, which represents the Army Corps. Then oral arguments will be scheduled, and U.S. Judge Thomas M. Durkin will issue an opinion, possibly in late summer or early fall. The start of construction, originally set for last summer, has been delayed.
A better path forward than a lawsuit would be for the city and state, along with the Army Corps, to agree on a different site for the dredged sediment, even if an alternative site costs more and is not quite as convenient. The Corps did consider other sites, but none outside the neighboring community, where residents don’t want it because the area is already impacted by contaminants from its industrial past, including brownfields.
Money could be saved, environmentalists say, by using the cleaner part of the sediment from Calumet Harbor as fill under roadbeds or in ecosystem restoration. And any plan should call for reducing the amount of contamination that gets into the water by regularly cleaning parking lots in the 2,500 acres of industrial land along the river.
Storing the dredged material right by the river and Lake Michigan might appear cheaper in the short run, but future Lake Michigan water levels are expected to fluctuate to a greater degree. Already, property owners around the lake are battling erosion, and the Army Corps is studying ways to protect the Chicago shoreline.
“There are 10-to-15-foot waves when we have storm surges,” said Amalia NietoGomez, executive director of the Alliance of the Southeast.
If stronger storms fueled by climate change batter the site in the future during high lake levels, the shoreline protection could fail, and pollutants could be washed right back into the lake. At that point, cleaning up the lake — the source of the city’s drinking water — would cost significantly more than finding a more suitable site now.
“This is an accident waiting to happen,” Howard A. Learner, executive director of the Environmental Law & Policy Center and a lawyer involved in the lawsuit, told us.
Protecting a park and reducing exposure to contaminants for residents and workers in an area that has been labeled an environmental justice community would certainly be in keeping with Johnson’s campaign promises.
A park would be a far greater asset to the community than expanding the confined disposal facility, and it would do more to spur redevelopment. It’s time for lawmakers to deliver on that promise.
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