Residents have many ideas for Palouse Brownsfield site

Picture a rustic restaurant in Palouse with a kid’s recreation room on one side. Or a two-story building with residential and commercial spaces. Or a kayak launch site on the North Palouse river bank.

These were a few of the ideas jotted down at a public brainstorming session Sept. 30, for the future of the city’s Brownsfield site on E. Main Street in Palouse.

The state Department of Ecology and the city are working to repair and restore the half-acre of contaminated land on Main Street into a useful community site.

A crowd of roughly 55 residents, Palouse city council members and others gathered in the high school gym to be briefed on the project. They were then asked to discuss their project visions in groups at tables.

Participants chatted for more than half an hour, looked at maps of the site and shared their ideas with facilitators.

The meeting was to get the local opinion for the site, part of the restoration process for which Palouse received a $200,000 grant from the Department of Ecology.

Leading the meeting and the environmental study of the site was Michael Stringer of Maul Foster Alongi, an environmental consulting firm based in Vancouver.

The firm has been contracted to do a feasibility study to evaluate and survey the site, located at the 400 block of E. Main Street.

“We’d like to keep Palouse’s stamp of ownership on the space,” said Bev Pearce, proprietor of a downtown quilt shop.

The site is presently owned by John Sell.

Several residents suggested linking the site to WSU or the UI, employers of many Palouse residents. They noted Palouse is a “bedroom community” for the universities.

One person said the “bedroom community” concept should be thrown out because Palouse should find its own identity and put up a building that defines Palouse, not any other city nearby.

“We had all walks of Palouse <at the meeting>,” said Mayor Michael Echanove.

Some people were very interested in making use of the site’s location along the North Palouse River. A kayak launch, beach or a small patio overlooking the river were all suggested as possible ways to make the river more approachable.

“I think it’s important to be able to have access that goes down to the river,” said Councilman Andrew O’Neill.

In the 1980s, frequent petroleum spills from a former fertilizer business, Palouse Producers, left the site a hazard, and it was deemed as such by the DOE.

The DOE term “brownsfield” is a “real property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant.”

Next step will be to focus on the environmental aspect of the site, said Stringer, project manager. His firm will now take a series of soil samples of the site and advise the city how best to go about cleaning up.

Maul Foster was hired on the $200,000 grant from DOE to guide Palouse through the process of restoring the site.

Once the idea for the property has been determined, said Echanove, the city and Maul Foster can put together a strategy for cleanup.

City staffers have been working since the mid-2000s to get the land assessed by the Environmental Protection Agency, which estimated that clean-up, plus five years of testing, would cost around $285,000.

Still up in the air is where the city will find the estimated $285,000 it will take to clean up the site and when the clean up will be finished, Echanove said.

Also still in question is where the city would find the funds to develop the future design.

The project has been in the works since 2006 when the EPA estimated the cleanup cost.