photo by: Nick Krug

The former Farmland site is seen in this aerial photograph on Monday, July 1, 2013.

One thing the City of Lawrence has learned through an outside study of the former Farmland fertilizer plant is that cleaning up the contaminated site is going to cost millions of dollars more than once thought.

As the more than $8 million fund meant to help cover the cleanup veers toward empty, it’s now estimated the city will need to spend another $40 million to remediate contaminants in the ground and water at the former Farmland Industries nitrogen plant. Though city officials say they hope it doesn’t end up costing that much, it will certainly be more than the city estimated when it agreed to take ownership of the bankrupt plant years ago and assume legal responsibility for the cleanup.

Municipal Services and Operations Director Dave Wagner said that since that time, technology has changed, more study has been done, and the city knows more about the contamination on the site than it originally did.

“We know a lot more about the site than what was known before, and the technologies have changed,” Wagner said. “The modeling tells us a lot more than anyone could have known about it 15 years ago.”

The city hired an outside firm two years ago to study the Farmland site and develop potential new cleanup plans after the original remediation method proved insufficient and the city ultimately abandoned it. With more information in hand and further study planned, choices about how the contamination will be dealt with and what that will cost the city should soon become clearer.

The 2010 deal

In the years since the city agreed to take over the former Farmland Industries fertilizer plant, several projections the city originally had about the deal have proven to be overly optimistic.

The city debated the deal for more than five years and eventually took ownership of the plant in 2010, under former City Manager David Corliss, with the plan of using part of the 467-acre site for its new business park, now known as VenturePark. Although the city paid nothing for the property and received an $8.6 million trust fund to pay for the cleanup, it also accepted full responsibility for remediating decades of nitrogen fertilizer sludge and wastewater that contaminated the soil, groundwater and surface water.

Too much nitrogen in the water — a form of nutrient pollution — can cause large algae blooms that harm water quality and decrease the amount of oxygen in the water, which harms fish and other aquatic animals, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. High levels of nitrates in drinking water can also be harmful to humans, especially infants.

At the time the city was considering the deal, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment estimated the cleanup would cost $13 million to $15 million over 30 years, as the Journal-World reported. But the city’s forecast was more optimistic, with city leaders hoping that by earning interest on the trust fund, making money from sales of the land for the business park, and saving money by using city crews for work KDHE assumed would be done by contractors, the trust fund would essentially cover the cost of the cleanup. In reality, the interest projections made at the time were overly optimistic, VenturePark failed to attract any companies until the city created a program that provided the land for free, and the cost for the cleanup has since increased.

Many of the issues came to a head in 2017, when storage of nitrogen-contaminated water on the site reached capacity after farmers began using less of the water to fertilize their fields. KDHE subsequently authorized the city to shut off the pumps that collected the contaminated groundwater and release approximately 30 million gallons of the water into the Kansas River over a period of five months under certain monitoring conditions so it was diluted. The pumps remain off to this day, and the city is monitoring the groundwater contamination to ensure it does not travel off site as a result of the pump shutdown, according to information provided to the Journal-World by KDHE spokesperson Kristi Zears. Zears said KDHE has not reauthorized discharge of contaminated groundwater into the river.

The increase in the estimated cost of the cleanup came after the city hired a consultant in April 2018 to identify better remediation methods for the site after the city’s method of distributing the nitrogen-contaminated water to farmers for use as fertilizer became insufficient. The city hired GHD Inc. to complete an analysis of the site and come up with at least five contingency plans, each with a cost-benefit analysis, to deal with the contamination at the site. The study was later expanded in February 2019 because GHD said it did not have the information it needed about how deeply and broadly the contaminants — namely nitrate, ammonia and nitrite — had spread through the groundwater and soil on the site. The expansion of the study brought its total cost to about $370,000, according to past memos to the City Commission.

New cleanup plans

Though new methods of cleaning up the site are in development, there are still several steps before the city will decide on a new plan.

KDHE must approve the city’s new remediation plans, and GHD submitted the approximately 181-page cost-benefit analysis to KDHE in April of this year, according to KDHE records. The analysis recommends capping source areas of contamination where removal is impractical to prevent further leaching of contaminants into groundwater and establishing constructed wetlands at the site to receive and enhance treatment of pumped water, according to Zears. Zears said in an email to the Journal-World that the next step in the process to develop remediation alternatives is for the city to contract with a firm to conduct a feasibility study evaluating technical details of the cleanup options.

That pending study is why the cost of the cleanup is still an estimate. Wagner said that whatever firm the city decides to hire for the next step in the process will need to conduct pilot studies to make sure the proposed remediation methods work. As it stands now, the city is estimating the cleanup will cost $40 million, which includes capital investment of $14 million over the next five years to design and construct the new method followed by $2 million annually to operate and maintain it, according to city project planning documents.

Wagner said potential solutions could include wetlands treatments, but also a physical plant similar to a wastewater treatment plant, bioremediation, capping, and growing and removing agricultural products, or some combination of methods. While Wagner said the hope is that the city ends up spending less than the $40 million estimate, the cost won’t be known until more study is done.

“Obviously it would be great to be able to do it for less than we project, but we won’t really know the answer to that until we get through some of the actual groundwork that says this works and this doesn’t,” Wagner said. “Some solutions are significantly more expensive than others.”

The remediation area is located on the back portion of the site, behind the VenturePark lots, and comprises 168 acres, according to information provided to the Journal-World by city project engineer Sarah Graves. The site is also the city’s top choice to locate its proposed field operations headquarters. Wagner said there is potential for mutually beneficial aspects if the headquarters is built on the site, such as a plant to clean the nitrogen-contaminated water being part of the headquarters and parking lots capping soil and aiding in containment.

The city’s 2021 Capital Improvement Plan calls for $1.5 million toward the Farmland remediation, and several million dollars are planned for each of the subsequent years and will have to be approved as part of the city’s annual budget process. Budget documents project the fund balance for the Farmland Remediation Fund will subsequently drop to about $34,000 by the end of 2021.

Wagner said some of the $1.5 million budgeted for 2021 will go to operational costs for monitoring groundwater wells and other equipment at the Farmland site, but that the rest will depend on the ongoing reviews with KDHE and what pilot studies or interim steps occur next year. He said that the $1.5 million is essentially functioning as a placeholder until more information is known, and that those decisions will all go through the normal city processes for proposals and approvals.