Quote:
Originally Posted by New Era
- This is our only chance to cleanup WV!
Well, history sure seems to support this claim. Some of us have watched this whole story unfold for a very long time, likely what is your entire life. This has been a problem for almost half a century and there is no end in sight. How many failed proposals do there have to be before you wake up and realize that the only way this land is going to get cleaned up is through a public works project? You can sit there and act all smug, but you obviously don't know anything about the history of Calgary or that particular tract of land. Go back and do some research to see all the proposals there were through out the years to have that land developed, but see developer after developer scared off by the remediation costs. In 50 years, throughout all the boom times when people were making more money than god, there has not been one interest to step up and propose a project that could reasonably make money at that location. So yes, this may be the only chance to clean up the west village in our lifetimes, because no one else has made it go in the past 50 years!
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I think this point is lost on a lot of people who seem to have strong opinions on the development 'options' and think the Flames should be told to take a hike on their proposal because so many better uses can be made of the lands.
Do people realize that the leading edge of the contamination monitoring is being done
inside homes in West Hillhurst and with groundwater monitoring wells just south of Bowness Road and 16th / 17th street NW?
http://aep.alberta.ca/lands-forests/...e-testing.aspx
The creosote contamination on the site is so bad it migrated
under the river and the current pressing issues are to monitor human health risks in air quality in basements of houses that already exist some distance north of the proposed excavation site. Maybe this problem is way more serious and complicated than the City wants to talk about because they deliberately bought a toxic waste dump for development land without doing any due diligence on the extent of the problem and whether it was even suitable for development.
The City is a handful of negative test results away from facing the prospect of a major segment of existing development being declared uninhabitable by humans. Is that a more realistic thing to happen in the next decade than some other magical cost-effective development of the subject lands? Its not like you have to search far for the precedent of a major gong show along the same lines:
http://calgaryherald.com/news/local-...y-cleanup-plan
In my view, nobody in their right mind would even consider buying that land without the cleanup already being done in advance, or getting full indemnity from
public funds for all of the cleanup costs. How many private developers do you know of that would just roll the dice on whether they might have to participate (or even just suffer construction delays from) an environmental cleansing of one of the most difficult contaminants to handle from under one of the most important rivers to the people and ecology of Alberta?
It is possibly the number one factor to the credit of the CalgaryNext proposal - that the Flames ownership group would even be willing to participate in a development on this site.