The Landscape Gumshoes

Through your many services, you basically help businesses and properties come into compliance with environmental regulations. Are we to assume that conflict is inherent in your work?
Doug McVey: That’s exactly it.

Mark Hellstein: Yes, absolutely. Conflict is a part of every day. It’s a tug of war between environmental and economic considerations. We treat every situation with integrity and consistency.

Why are there so many contaminated sites on so many valuable parcels of real estate?
MH: We are the product of a highly industrialized society. There are by-products everywhere of things like perchloroethylene—used in the dry cleaning process—or asbestos, polychlorinated biphenyl [PCB], and residual heating oil in buildings. Closed gas stations might have benzene, tolulene, or MTBE leachate.

DM: The presence of toxic chemicals is extraordinarily common. Post-World War II, industry didn’t know how to manage chemicals. It dumped them into pits or thought we were allowing them to evaporate when in fact they were going into the ground.

As I understand it, there is some gumshoe sleuthing as well as physical investigation involved in environmental site assessment. How does that work?
DM: After physically inspecting a building and site, we look into archived records to find out what activities happened in and around the property. Keep in mind, most Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] records were not required until 1985, so information before that can be sketchy. Some sources are insurance company and fire department documents, when they exist, because that is where the presence of such things as fuel tanks and fuel lines were recorded. That tells us a lot about where and what to look for, including where to do test borings.

To buy or build on a brownfield site, what needs to be considered?
MH: There are many variables, but much of it depends on the future use of the site. You have to know if there will be a demolition—or significant excavation and regrading of the land.

Do you have any special strategies for making this a smoother process?
MH: It’s about establishing the objective of the deliverable. To know how the building or site will be used, gather together the players in this process: the design firm, contractors, and subcontractors. Should any of them run into contaminants by surprise, it can result in a six- or seven-figure change order. It often makes sense to require the seller of a property to purchase environmental insurance to cover cost overages due to undiscovered contaminants.

You remediated a 150,000-square-foot historical site, Nonotuck Mill in Northampton, Massachusetts, that was contaminated. Why did you take on that challenge, and how has it turned out?
DM: Built in the 1830s, it was originally a silk-processing plant operating off hydropower, then later [it] housed a utopian society and [was] a stop on the Underground Railway. Subsequent use involved substantial amounts of waste oils and toxins on the property that we had to clean up.

Purchase and renovation of the property, including the $500,000 cost to clean up the site, came to $3.9 million. [Crawford Drilling Services, LLC installed monitoring and recovery wells associated with the remediation.] It always comes down to the net dollars, weighing those costs against market rents. [80 percent of the space is leased, and ECS houses its terraclime geothermal division alongside some other offices there.] It is also a great demonstration of three different ground-source heat-pump systems, providing geothermal energy for heating and cooling.

You provide LEED services and have a LEED-certified building?
MH: Our Tampa office provides indoor-environment-quality testing to support LEED certifications. So, it made sense that our building achieve LEED Silver for commercial interiors, with vinyl and carpet flooring containing post-consumer recycled products, VOC-free paints and adhesives, refurbished furniture systems, natural lighting, and low-wattage light fixtures. Note that green doesn’t end inside—the roof and parking lot are sunlight reflective while plumbing and irrigation systems use low-water technologies. ABQ