Cleanup of potential park site is stalled over cost disputes
For more than a year, the Army and a county-hired contractor have been feuding over who’s responsible for cost overruns in the multimillion-dollar cleanup of a former artillery range envisioned as a future county park.
Now, the subcontractor hired to remove unexploded ordnance has pulled out of Camp Bonneville.
Texas-based Pika International pulled up stakes late last month. Pika and its subsidiary, MKM Engineers, were the lead subcontractors overseeing the removal of munitions. The president of the nonprofit organization heading the cleanup — Bonneville Conservation Restoration and Renewal Team — blamed the Army for failing to provide enough money.
“‘We can’t afford to bankroll the Army,’ I think was their actual quote,” said Mike Gage, president of BCRRT.
Pika representatives declined to comment to The Columbian.
County officials are displeased with the situation. In Army parlance, they believe Pika has gone AWOL.
“We don’t think it’s acceptable for the subcontractor to have walked off the site,” said Jerry Barnett, Clark County project manager. “It’s our position they need to be out there doing the work that they were hired to do.”
At this point, the cleanup is unlikely to resume until BCRRT and the Army resolve their dispute.
Pika’s departure is the latest development in a rocky four-year cleanup project that began in 2006. The Army accuses Gage of extravagant spending on items such as meals, bar tabs and gift boxes, while Gage accuses the Army of bureaucratic foot-dragging. State environmental regulators, overseeing the cleanup, see plenty of blame to go around.
“To see a lapse in productivity of the cleanup is concerning,” said Barry Rogowski, project manager for the state Department of Ecology.
Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is continuing to assess a petition to turn it into a federal Superfund site.
The Army, which used the 3,840-acre site as an artillery range and training area from 1909 until 1995, turned it over to Clark County in 2006. The county, in turn, hired Gage’s organization to clean up known hot spots under a $24 million fixed-price contract with the Army.
Gage contends the Army grossly underestimated the extent of pollution on the site, and therefore should pay more.
“I’ll promise you my left arm that they will pay for this,” he said. “I’m convinced of that.”
Army grants officer Douglas Hadley, in Omaha, Neb., said the Army is continuing to work with Clark County on disbursing a $7.7 million contingency fund for cost overruns. However, Gage said he will file a dispute resolution claim this month asking for a much larger figure for “Army-retained conditions.” Earlier this year, Gage tabulated $24 million in additional costs for clearing firing ranges and munitions sites the Army missed.
The stalemate was anticipated by federal environmental regulators six years ago.
The EPA washed its hands of cleanup oversight in 2003, specifically citing the Army’s inability or unwillingness to properly investigate the extent of pollution on the site. In September 2006, a month before the early transfer to Clark County, the EPA’s regional director for environmental cleanup reiterated those concerns to the state Department of Ecology.
“Given that site characterization is not complete and some significant data gaps still exist, projecting costs is difficult,” the EPA’s Daniel Opalski wrote in a letter to Ecology toxics cleanup manager Jim Pendowski. “The general challenge of reliable cost estimation is compounded by the fact that munitions cleanup is inherently costly work, so varying assumptions can lead to large swings in estimated costs.”
Further, Opalski noted that “an extremely complex” transfer and funding arrangement — between the Army, the county and the county’s contractor — may hamstring the state’s ability to force a cleanup. “The complex relationships … may serve to complicate what otherwise may be a straightforward liability claim,” Opalski wrote.
Gage noted that, even though large unanticipated tracts of pollution remain to be addressed, most of the areas identified in the original scope of work have been cleared.
The county’s Barnett said the site is cleaner today than three years ago.
“For better or worse, I feel like we were able to get a significant portion of that property cleaned up,” he said. “Whether or not we use it as a park, it’s a parcel in the middle of the county that was causing a problem.”
The longer the cleanup languishes, the greater the risk of dangerous pollutants’ seeping down into a major regional aquifer, said Dvija Michael Bertish, a Vancouver environmental activist. Bertish, who served on a since-disbanded citizens advisory group for Camp Bonneville, noted that he and others had warned the county against an early transfer of the site.
“Nobody listened, and everything we told them would happen is happening,” Bertish said. “Somewhere in that central valley floor, there’s more burial pits of God knows what.”
