RFP Staff
♦According to minutes of their June 5, 2007 meeting, Salisbury City Council voted to go into “closed session” under NCGS 143-318.11(5) regarding acquisition of property located at 329 [South] Main Street, and NCGS 143-318.11(3) to consult with an attorney. The motion was made by Bill Burgin, who then sat on City Council. Paul Woodson seconded the motion, and the remaining three council members Kennedy, Lewis and Kluttz voted with them to go into closed session.
Upon their return to open session, according to the minutes, Bill Burgin “made a motion that the City of Salisbury purchase the property at 329 South Main Street for the purchase price of $209,000.” Salisbury Banker Mark Lewis seconded the motion, and it passed unanimously.
View the minutes from the June 5, 2007 City Council meeting here.
The city has claimed in the other news media on numerous occasions that they had multiple letters from NCDENR which gave them the “green light” to purchase risk-free. However, any basic inquiry into the accuracy of such assertions will show that those bold statements were made without a CERCLA ASTM ESA — at the time of the purchase—which would have been the only means for any determination of no risk. The city proclaimed to the other news media that letters from Dan Graham (NCDENR) said the property was “free and clear of any contamination”, which was simply not the case at all. The fact is, the NCDENR letters merely state that the previous owner had removed several UST’s (Underground Storage Tanks) prior to 1991 to NCDENR’s satisfaction, and that ‘no further action’ would be necessary — at the time — on that particular issue.
Neither the EPA nor NCDENR has ever written any letter stating that this property was “free and clear of any contamination”, nor would readers likely be able to find examples of such letters from either entity, anywhere on any property, in this state or outside it, that concludes it is a risk-free property to purchase. The fact is, only a full report authored by a qualified engineering firm can give the purchaser and his or her lender a certain level of certainty before buying a property. The CERCLA ASTM ESA is the comprehensive report on which a buyer can rely for ‘relative’ certainty that a site most likely lacks in contamination. And the City of Salisbury did not spend the money to obtain a CERCLA ASTM ESA report prior to purchasing.
In fact, Salisbury did not request such a report until February 2012, and the report was prepared on or about April 27, 2012, and sent to school office project architect Bill Burgin. In the interim from the time then-councilman Bill Burgin made the motion to purchase the site without a CERCLA ASTM ESA report, the City sat on the property with zero environmental assessments conducted for nearly five years. It was only with an opportunity to ‘gift’ the site to the County for a school administrative building in early 2012, that the architect and school officials hired a top-notch environmental engineering firm, ESP, to perform a CERCLA ESA PHASE I survey. The reason? Before a county can approach the Local Government Commission for loan financing, the “LGC” requires a clean and clear environmental assessment to be included in the financing proposal.
Normally, it is after the environmental work has been completed that the design is completed. In the case of the PHASE I survey requested in February 2012 and completed for presentation to the project architect on April 27, 2012 — some FIVE years after the purchase of 329 South Main Street by the City of Salisbury, the Phase I submitted at the behest of the architect and the City recommended further investigative work: limited site assessment, soil borings and electromagnetic survey for what was suspected to be three additional orphaned tanks.
After April 27, 2012, and after months of political posturing by the Taj Mahal promoters — two of which were defeated in a bid to stack the county commission with their own kind — finally those recommendations were followed. On October 19, 2012, the City of Salisbury issued a press release that was dutifully printed by the local media, espousing their alternate reality by claiming that although in 1991, “the site was issued a letter of no further action from NCDENR,” that the day before the press release, “regarding supplemental soil sampling and testing . . . indicate petroleum impact.”
The press release goes on to cite then-planning director Joe Morris saying, “The City of Salisbury, in good faith, considered the letter of no further action, in addition to conversations with DENR, regarding the letter, as factual evidence that abatement at the site was complete.”
Really, Joe? Why, then, did your architect Bill Burgin receive a letter from ESP (the engineers who had prepared the April report), referencing back to their alert about REC’s (Recognized Environmental Conditions) that had been identified at the site, including these three recommendations from their APRIL 27TH Phase I report, which Joe Morris and Bill Burgin had requested in February:
- Three undocumented possible orphan UST’s (“underground storage tanks”) located along the South Main Street side of the site as marked by ESP in a ground penetrating (GPR) survey;
- Pump islands and their associate underground fuel lines, and
- An oil/water separator located within the service bay of the site’s structure.
View the smoking gun, a letter detailing measures not taken at the time of the assessment: Click here for the smoking gun.
And with that evidence, would Joe still have us believe that Salisbury believed “that abatement at the site was complete”? Really, Joe? Of course, there is the Salisbury version of “factual evidence”, and then there is what we at the Rowan Free Press calls “terrestrial reality”. Of course folks are speculating that the April 27th Phase I was buried in order to get past the May primary; then the July runoff; and finally the November election. But that seems counter-intuitive, since the disregard of the April 27th letter outlining those Recognized Environmental Concerns, by their own engineering firm, only led to the discovery of contamination at the site which caused the kind of “October Surprise” that Craig Pierce and Mike Caskey could not have purchased with a six-digit campaign budget!
No one is about to accuse Joe Morris, nor Doug Paris or Paul Woodson, of being closet conservatives who could have deliberately bequested such a campaign boost on Pierce and Caskey. Far from it. So why did it take five and a half months for the knowledge of the REC’s to be discovered? Did architect Bill Burgin share the April 27th letter with the City and the School Board? Did the City share the report—including the three undocumented possible orphan Underground Storage Tanks—with the excavation contractor, so that he would not risk hitting them and causing a leak that could contaminate the groundwater? Inquiring minds recognize that none of these questions make a dime’s worth of difference to the county, since the County Commissioners are far from ready to be derelict in their duties and accept a Superfund Site as the city’s “gift” to the county! But this year is a municipal election year, and Mayor Woodson’s general laissez-faire attitude of “It’s a staff issue” may be challenged by inquisitive Salisbury voters, who are wondering why the UST’s were not known about, pursuant to the April 27, 2012 report, before they were slammed by excavation equipment on or about October 18, 2012, when the engineering firm had warned the architect, in writing, about them over five months earlier?
It’s also intriguing that then councilman Bill Burgin was the member making the motion to purchase the site at 329 South Main Street back on June 5, 2007. Of course, he would have had no idea whatsoever in 2007 that it would become the leading site for a Taj Mahal that he would be selected to design, and be paid half a million dollars. But as a top notch architect, it seems odd that he didn’t note that the old gas station site might need more than a UST abatement. Why then, did Bill Burgin not make a motion to finance an EPA ASTM ESA Phase I study before the City bought the site? I couldn’t fault the guy for just sitting there and blinking like Captain Pike on the old Star Trek series. After all, it isn’t a city councilman’s job to offer free professional advice to his board. But looking at those minutes from June 5, 2007, it is apparent that Bill Burgin led the council in recommending the purchase of an old gas station site, without any reasonable certainty that Recognized Environmental Condition’s would not crop up and cost months (if not years) of delays, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in abatement costs (all but around a hundred grand—not $20,000 as stated by the city manager (but that’s another story) — as well as paralyze the credibility of the City of Salisbury.
There are lots of opportunities for stories on this debacle, and several will be forthcoming in the coming weeks. But the real deadline that matters most for the Taj Mahal on South Main Street is December 1, 2014, when the new school board takes 
office and gets sworn in. If they finish what was started in 2012, then the lack of progress on the downtown site will reduce the ‘economic impact’ of the central office to zero for Salisbury. The new school board will support construction of a brand, spanking new metal building that will give them more room than the Burgin plan, and still come in under $6 million. It may look a bit like the following structure, yet perhaps with a few more windows. And maybe it will go next to the bus garage off Old Concord Road. Nice, clean, new, and practical—isn’t it? And it leaves no doubt where our county’s educational priorities are in the classroom, teaching students, instead of placing administrative bureaucrats in the lap of luxury next door to City Hall.
View the entire April 2012 Phase I Environmental Site Assessment for 329 So. Main here.
