http://www.pensacolanewsjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060409/NEWS01/604090322/1006
Kerry Kust got every application and inspection she needed to open her day-care center.
After months of scrutiny by city building officials and state health and day-care inspectors, she opened Sand Castle Academy at 4000 Palafox St. in February.
No one stopped her for being next door to a toxic Superfund site.
But now, more than a month after she opened, the center’s future is in jeopardy because of state and federal concerns over its proximity to the site.
“We are very, very concerned about this siting of a day care in an industrial area where it was never meant to be, based on what the (state Department of Environmental Protection) and the EPA tells us,” said Dr. John Lanza, director of the Escambia County Health Department.
“We’re dealing with babies here. I’m a pediatrician, and I’m extremely concerned about this situation.”
The day care’s property backs up to the Escambia Treating Co., a 26-acre hazardous waste site that prompted the 1997 evacuation of 358 residents in and around the Rosewood Terrace neighborhood.
It’s also across Palafox from the Clarinda Lane Triangle neighborhood, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is working to relocate 65 residents and demolish homes.
Until late March, when contacted by the News Journal, EPA and senior Escambia County Health Department officials were unaware Sand Castle opened near the site.
David Keefer, an EPA project manager in charge of the Escambia Treating site cleanup, reviewed the day-care center’s location in March. He found that about 200 feet north and east of the day care, three areas within the Superfund site contain concentrated dioxin levels that will be part of the cleanup.
Kust and her father, Larry Kendrick, who owns the property, are convinced the soil does not pose any risk to children. And, after spending $50,000 to turn the print shop he owned into a colorful, freshly scrubbed day care, they are stunned to learn that there are concerns.
Kust has approval to care for 29 children and soon expects to have certification to add 45 more. Her two children are enrolled, as are some of her employees’ children.
She has agreed to allow the Health Department to take soil samples to determine whether there is any contamination.
If health and environmental officials determine there’s a risk to children, the center could be shut down. It may be 30 to 60 days before a company can be contracted to take the samples, health officials said.
Randy Merchant, an environmental administrator with the Florida Department of Health, said the testing is especially necessary because the day care involves children.
“A 2-year-old child has much more hand-to-mouth activity than an adult,” he said. “To be protective, we assume a 2-year-old will accidentally ingest 200 milligrams of soil per day, which, even then, isn’t much.”
No idea what’s in the soil
While the warning signs aren’t visible from the day-care center or its playground, the EPA has posted a notice on the fence surrounding the Superfund site, just a few hundred feet south: “Warning! No trespassing! Contaminated area. Avoid contact with soil and water.”
There are several concerns about Sand Castle’s property:
? Neither the EPA nor the state Department of Environmental Protection could find any record of soil samples taken from the day-care center’s property during an evaluation of the neighborhood in the late-1990s, meaning they have no recorded data on what chemicals may be on the property.
? When the EPA begins removing soil and contaminants within a few hundred yards of the day care, it could expose children to hazardous chemicals, which will become airborne as dirt and dust are raised. Work is scheduled to begin in a year and could take as long as 2? years to complete.
? During heavy rain, water from the Superfund site may flow onto the day-care property, which could wash contaminants over the playground area and the rest of the property.
Kendrick, who has owned the property since 1992, said he took steps on his own in the late ’90s to counteract any contamination.
He had the top 6 inches of soil removed. Recently, when a new septic system was put into place, he had all of the soil plowed and turned under.
A 6-inch layer of sand covers the play area, which has a separate fence that keeps children from getting near the Superfund site.
Now that the day care is operating, Kendrick said it’s up to the EPA to make sure the center and all the surrounding businesses are protected when the heavy machinery rolls in to begin the cleanup.
Randall Chaffins, a Superfund section chief for the EPA, said last week that dust-control methods and other safety steps will be in place.
“We believe we can conduct the remedy at Escambia safely and will make adjustments as needed,” he said.
That seems reasonable to Kendrick.
“As long as they do their job and keep the dust out of the air, it should be OK,” he said. “It’s not like we’re turning the children outside and letting them eat dirt.”
The city issues permits
Matt Dimitroff, the environmental administrator for the city’s Community Development Department, talked with Kust last June about her plans for a day care.
Dimitroff said he strongly encouraged her not to proceed because she was so near the Superfund site and the Clarinda Lane Triangle.
He said he also encouraged her to contact the EPA.
“I certainly thought based on the information I provided that they would not move forward,” he said. “We were all shocked that they chose to proceed.”
Kust recalled getting a different response from the city.
She would not provide a name but said she was assured by a city employee that the site posed no risk to children.
In June, City Planning Services staff certified that a day-care center was allowed within the M-2, or heavy industrial, zone. In July, Kust applied for a certificate of occupancy, which was approved in February.
“I didn’t get stopped at zoning and I didn’t get stopped at licensing, so I just kept on going,” she said.
Kevin Cowper, the city director of Community Development, said zoning officials only consider whether a business fits into the uses allowed for a piece of property.
Because the day-care center was allowable under zoning regulations, the city was legally obligated to approve her request, as it was all her other building permits, he said.
Ed Spears, a city administrator with Neighborhood and Economic Development, met with Kust and Kendrick in March, about three weeks after Kust opened the day care.
In preparing for the meeting, Spears looked at the center’s location on a map and realized it was next to the Superfund site.
But, he said: “I very assertively told the owners that our position was one of concern over the location.”
He said he showed them maps of the area, pointing out Escambia Treating on the east and Clarinda Triangle to the west. He went over the risk of soil contact and exposure to airborne particles that could be stirred up by heavy machinery.
Spears said he told them that several years down the road, once cleanup was over, their location might be ideal for a day care.
Kust and Kendrick said Spears mentioned the environmental concerns, but only in passing.
Spears also suggested they relocate, Kust said, but they couldn’t consider it.
“We were already licensed,” she said. “It was too late.”
“This thing ain’t a hot-dog stand,” Kendrick said. “You can’t just roll it down the street.”
Most of the meeting, Kust said, focused on the city’s Enterprise Zone Program, which offers economic incentives for businesses to move into low-income or blighted areas, some of which border the Escambia Treating Superfund site.
Kust has a sheaf of papers from the city that details income tax credits, property tax refunds, business equipment refunds and other incentives for which her business is eligible.
She and her father estimate that over 10 years, if her applications are approved, the city will return as much as $10,000 in taxes and other credits to them.
Officials were not alerted
Once the city issued its permits, Kust moved to the next step: getting permits from the Escambia County Health Department.
Health Department inspectors visited the day care three times before issuing kitchen, food- handling and septic-tank permits in January and February.
Lanza and other senior-level Health Department administrators say despite those visits, they were not alerted by their inspectors.
“One would have hoped that my staff would have seen that it was butting up against the Rosewood Terrace area and then perhaps let senior leaders and environmental health know,” Lanza said. “Why that did not happen, I do not know.”
Lanza said the EPA has advised him that even after the Escambia Treating site is cleaned, it would not allow a day-care center to locate on the Superfund property.
“The EPA never intended for a day care to be located in an industrial/commercial area,” he said.
Dotting i’s, crossing t’s
After Kust got her permits from the Health Department, she also needed the Department of Children & Families to license her day-care center.
Roger Thompson, director of licensing for the local region, recalled that she was meticulous about following every suggestion his staff made.
The Children & Families license pertains to the operational aspects of a day care, Thompson said. His staff normally would not look at environmental health issues because city building officials and health officials would have considered those permits first, he said.
“We have to rely on the Health Department and Building Inspections, the people that really know when it comes to something like that,” he said. “We will not issue a license unless they give their approval first.”
If health and environmental experts determine that the site cleanup could pose a risk to children, Children & Families will work with Kust to determine the best options, Thompson said.
That could include restricting children’s activity during construction, adding better filtering to the air-conditioning system or planning field trips so children can have activity away from the center, he said.
Kust already has contacted Thompson’s office to begin discussing the possibilities.
“She has been very cooperative,” he said.
Unsure of the future
Kendrick can’t understand why the EPA would relocate residents up the road from the contaminated site but leave business owners sitting right next door.
He hopes that in the future, the city, the Health Department and the EPA will pay more attention to businesses when they look at environmental impact.
Health Department officials say they are taking steps to prevent anyone else from opening a day care or school near a Superfund site.
All permit requests now are being mapped to show their proximity to a Superfund site, and they are being checked by a supervisor, said Robert Merritt, environmental manager for the department’s Environmental Health Services.
Lanza believes the Sand Castle permitting shows that the city, county and Health Department should create a board to evaluate rezoning requests.
“There is no formal process to look at this for the environmental health of the county,” he said.
The city’s Cowper agrees that the need for better communication among agencies is apparent.
“Clearly, that’s something we can take out of this,” he said. “I’m not sure it would have made a difference, but it may have taken the surprise factor out of it. Apparently, the Health Department was taken by surprise.
“In retrospect, we should have contacted them because the red flags were going up. This was not something we wanted to see happen.”