Local nonprofit RiverLink will get $300,000 in federal stimulus money to clean up the former Edaco auto junkyard on the French Broad River, a key step in the process of turning the property into a park, officials said Tuesday.
The Edaco property sits between Carrier Park — the former Asheville Motor Speedway — and French Broad River Park and has been a missing link in a stretch of green space between the river and Amboy Road in West Asheville.
RiverLink bought the property in 2006, and in 2007 a contractor removed 10,000 to 11,000 tons of concrete from the site.
An examination of the soil found gas, oil and other pollutants, “about what you’d expect for a junkyard,” said Karen Cragnolin, executive director of RiverLink.
The Land-of-Sky Regional Council’s Regional Brownfields Initiative announced Tuesday that it had won the $300,000, along with $360,000 to remove other substances from sites in Conover and Forest City, from stimulus funds appropriated to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“Brownfields” is a term used to refer to former industrial sites needing environmental cleanup before they can be returned to productive use.
Cleanup work on the riverfront property should begin this fall, said Kate O’Hara, who manages the brownfields initiative at Land-of-Sky. The pace of work will depend in part on what workers find as they remove soil, she said.
RiverLink’s plans call for the use of vegetation to remove some of the contamination in addition to more traditional means.
The property is to become Karen Cragnolin Park. Cragnolin said some donations have already been lined up to help beautify the property after the cleanup is complete.
Conover, located southeast of Hickory, will use its portion of the funds to ready a former industrial site for residential and commercial use and a transit center, O’Hara said. Forest City envisions a mixed-use project to include a cinema on the land it will clean up.
Source: Asheville Citizen Times
