Mo. agency faces audit over cleanup oversight

ST. LOUIS -- The Missouri Auditor's office will review the Missouri Hazardous Waste Program following newspaper reports that exposed oversight concerns about the cleanup of the former Carondelet Coke site in St. Louis.

Stories in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch raised concerns about the cleanup that is costing taxpayers millions of dollars. A spokesman for Missouri Auditor Tom Schweich told the Post-Dispatch that two auditors will spend at least four months reviewing records of the Hazardous Waste Program.

The Post-Dispatch investigation found that the Missouri Department of Economic Development had committed $12.3 million to the cleanup. Former owners Laclede Gas Co. and SGL Group were paying $471,250 and Carondelet Coke owner J. Donald Crane was paying nothing.

The 42-acre site is considered to be among the most polluted land in the state.

The site sits at the confluence of the River Des Peres and Mississippi River. Laclede Gas built a plant there in 1915 to burn coal and produce coke and other chemicals for gas lighting. Great Lakes Carbon bought it in 1950, and Carondelet Coke, owned by Crane, of Elma, N.Y., bought it in 1980.

The plant closed in 1987, and the city of St. Louis became owner through a tax foreclosure sale in 1992.

State testing found "extensive soil contamination" that included arsenic, asbestos, coal tar, cyanide and carcinogens such as benzene and naphthalene.

Rather than requiring cleanup through the federal Superfund program, officials in the Hazardous Waste Program in 1996 agreed to let Laclede Gas, which owned the site the longest, do a voluntary cleanup. It never happened.

In 2004, the city informed the state it intended to apply for Brownfield Redevelopment Tax Credits to clean up the site and help a private company develop a business park.

The state authorized brownfield tax credits to pay for remediation. The Post-Dispatch said lax oversight allowed that bill to grow.

Schweich has also said he plans to audit the brownfield tax credit program as a result of the Carondelet Coke stories. The program through the Department of Economic Development gives tax credits to developers who clean up abandoned or underused industrial or commercial sites for reuse.