Complicating things even further for TechCity’s plans is that the cleanup was being administered under two separate programs: the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and the Inactive Hazardous Waste Disposal Site Program, also known as the Superfund. The consent order announced last week, according to the DEC, combines the adjudication of the cleanup into one enforcement document, a move which officials promise will streamline the regulatory process and get the rebuild moving sooner by speeding up the environmental review process. “Integrating the RCRA and the Superfund requirements into one approach will allow redevelopment of the site to begin while providing a framework for additional investigation and remediation,” said DEC Commissioner Martens. “This consent order is a win for TechCity, a win for the Town of Ulster and a win for the environment.”
Martens stressed the importance of TechCity to the region’s economic health and said new approaches to redeveloping “brownfields” was high on the priority list of Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “A healthy environment and a healthy economy go hand in hand,” Martens said.
According to TechCity and DEC officials, the consent order — which is in essence a legal settlement between the state, IBM and TechCity — divides the campus into 10 parcels and allows each of them to be developed under its own environmental review process and be cleaned up with techniques tailored to the issues each of the parcels faces individually. Seven parcels with “minimal or no contamination” are identified as being “close to completion and can be redeveloped,” according to a release from the company. Those parcels, lying in TechCity’s 138-acre East Campus, will be the focus of the redevelopment plan, company officials said. That plan, unveiled in late 2008 and currently wending its way through the environmental review process, includes the demolition of several buildings, construction of more than 800,000 square feet of new space and the conversion of more than 500,000 square feet of abandoned building space into covered parking.
Ginsberg has a vision of the new TechCity as a mixed-use facility with renewable energy manufacturing, data centers, office space, distribution and warehouse operations, retail and residential space — all of it using the latest “green” energy and construction methods. “We went for a ‘wow factor’ in our master plan,” said Ginsburg, who took possession of the site in 1996 and has been promising ever since that it one day would teem with profitable tenants and workers, a vow he repeated last week. “We’re going to fill this place up and create thousands of jobs.”
He said he wants the redevelopment plan fully implemented by 2016. “Our master plan is the future for TechCity, the town and this region,” Ginsberg said.
Bonacic, who praised Martens for keeping a promise he made when he was nominated for DEC commissioner to push to separate the parcels, was a bit more circumspect and precise in his assessment, but no less sanguine. “We didn’t create jobs today, but we did a great thing. We took the handcuffs off with a change in attitude.”
