Q&A with DEC’s Andrew Guglielmi about Public Place

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is making progress at Public Place. At a March 12 public meeting of the Gowanus Oversight Task Force (GOTF), Andrew Guglielmi, director of the division of environmental remediation at the DEC, announced several new developments in the remediation of the former Citizens manufactured gas plant site, which someday will house the affordable housing development Gowanus Green.

For one, he shared that the negotiations between the DEC and National Grid—the utility company responsible for the pollution at the site— that have stalled the remediation since 2024, is nearing a resolution; Guglielmi also revealed that after being locked out for several years, the state intended to enter Parcel 4—unlike the other three parcels at the site which are all in the Brownfield Cleanup Program, Parcel 4 is a state superfund site—later this year.

In April, the Star-Revue sat down with Guglielmi for an exclusive interview about the remediation work at the former Citizens site. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Let’s start with Parcel 4. At the task force meeting you said that the DEC has sent a letter to the owner. How are you getting in this time? What is the procedure?
As you may be aware, that’s currently a parcel that houses a lot of food trucks that are parked there, which we expect, as the weather gets warmer down in Brooklyn, will be out and about during the day. So our current plan—and we let the owner know this—is that we will be out there in May to start identifying areas where we would like to investigate, where to take samples that we’ve been wanting to take on that parcel. So we will come with that letter in hand, which gives us the authority to access the property, and we plan to see how that goes once we get on there and talk to the owner.

What kind of letter is that? Is that a court order, or is it related to the superfund law?
The Superfund law allows DEC, upon giving 10 days notice to an owner of a property, if we have reason to believe that there is contamination on a piece of property that needs to be investigated by us to see whether or not the site needs to be listed [as an inactive hazardous waste disposal site], we have under the law an ability to access that property and take samples.

Why has this authority not been used before on this site? This has been an issue for many years now.
Statewide, if we have a responsible party on board that is responsible for investigating and cleaning up contamination, we try to give that responsible party an opportunity to gain access to property. We try our best to gain that access voluntarily. We’re not in the business of getting on people’s property who don’t want us there, who could be potentially obstructionist or violent. So we try as best we can to do this kind of thing voluntarily. After repeated attempts by responsible parties to access property are unsuccessful, we then look to the pretty strong authority that we have to access people’s private property for this purpose. It’s not something we do lightly. And that’s not unique to this situation down here in Brooklyn with this particular site. That’s what we do statewide.

Is there a timeline for that responsible party to do this? Because you could imagine a scenario where they would drag that out to avoid having to do the cleanup.
Absolutely. And this is something that we address sort of case by case and site by site. Especially when a site is a potential significant threat to public health and the environment, we can’t wait forever, certainly. So it’s something that we manage with the resources that we have, as well, and the prioritization that we have to do with so many sites out there and so many areas that we have to investigate. So there’s no set amount of time. We try to manage this in coordination with responsible parties to manage our resources—and their resources, for that matter.

Moving to parcels 1 and 2 that make up Gowanus Green, you mentioned at the Gowanus Oversight Task Force meeting that the dispute resolution process is hopefully done soon. You also described the issue holding up negotiations: obstructions in the ground National Grid claims will complicate the remediation, a claim which the DEC has asked National Grid to prove. Given that this dispute resolution process has been going on for two years now, is there not an opportunity for DEC to do that investigation itself?
We were hoping that we’d be done with this process sooner than we have been. We have a legal agreement with National Grid; we attempt again voluntarily to secure whatever work that’s necessary to site.

And actually I do have an update on this specific issue. We have a work plan that’s been approved for National Grid to go out and look at various portions of parcels 1 and 2 for these obstructions that they say are there. Field work is actually beginning on Monday [April 20]. That work will probably take a week or two to go throughout the site and see where are these obstructions and how are we going to then move forward with designing a remedy to address that contamination.

Should we have stepped in ourselves and made it happen sooner? I don’t think so. I think that would’ve delayed this project even further. National Grid would have an ability to dispute us taking action and potentially bring us to court saying that we didn’t have the authority [to start work]. Not only that, just practically, we would have to retain our own contractors and go through potentially a contracting process, spending the state’s money that we then would have to recover from National Grid. So there’s a lot of reasons not to do that and to continue to try and work with responsible parties so that they do all that work.

Is the Brownfield program preferable for the state when that option exists?
That’s really a policy question that goes outside of my area of expertise. I will say, one of the things that we consider here at the DEC is we only want to spend the state taxpayers’ money when it’s necessary. So if we have a party that’s willing to clean up contamination … and it all goes back to when was that contamination discovered. So if a private party, either the owner of that property or a developer, is unwilling or unable to step in and investigate and then clean up contamination, we have to take action under the State Superfund [Program]. It really has to do a lot with when contamination is discovered, and that I think drives what you’re talking about maybe more than what we prefer.

But I will say that in a lot of instances some of our state superfund sites, we’re dealing with property that’s been abandoned. The Brownfield Cleanup Program does, in a lot of instances, result in quicker cleanups because having to reach out to all the responsible parties, find out who they are, allow them an opportunity to do the work before we step in and do the work, and then all the contracting.

If you’re being a little bit self-critical of the agency: There seems to be a level of distrust in the EDC, at least from some members of the community. Is there anything you could have done more or could do more at this point to better communicate the realities of the safety of the site, of the limits of how much work can be done and still make it safe?
The nature of what we do when we’re dealing with contaminants under the ground inherently, I think, makes residents that live near sites like this scared, worried. These processes are complicated. They take a long time, how to investigate and then decide how you’re going to remediate sites. So I certainly don’t blame the community or neighbors of these sites for being scared and worried and skeptical. But we are experts. This is what we do every day.

I think there are certain portions of this community that will never trust what we say or what we do here. We understand that. That’s part of the job, that there are going to be people on all sides of an issue that are never going to fully accept what we think is science, data, reality. That is not our job to convince people of something that they’re never going to be convinced of. Our job is to try and explain the science and the data, and to ultimately only say a project is done when we are confident based on all that data and science that the job has been done right.

We asked the DEC whether National Grid, as a participant and not a volunteer in the cleanup of parcels 1 and 2, is eligible for tax credits after completing the remediation. A DEC spokesperson could not answer, and instead directed us to National Grid or the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. A National Grid representative wrote in an email that tax credit eligibility is determined by DEC and the State Department of Taxation and finance, and directed us to either agency. The tax and finance department did not respond to request for comment.