The Eagle Mill campus sits on the banks of the Housatonic River in the heart of Lee. The $80 million project to transform the former industrial site into a mixed-use development including market rate and affordable housing began in 2012, with a ceremonial groundbreaking in 2021. At its July 2nd meeting, the Lee select board heard the findings of an Environmental Protection Agency required report on the cleanup needed for the project to continue.
“This site has been investigated for over the last 14 or more years, and a lot of different things have been looked at as part of this site to make sure we understand what is there in terms of contamination. A lot of that funding has been through the town of Lee, the Eagle Mill redevelopment team, and Berkshire Planning Commission as well.”
Scott Buchanan is a project manager for TRC Companies, a Connecticut-based construction firm working on the project.
“The things that were looked at were hazardous building materials, the asbestos containing materials, lead containing paint, and other hazardous regulated materials, light bulbs, ballast, mercury switches, all those types of things," he told the select board. "That has been understood of what's there so that cleanup planning can be made and figured out, A, for what it's going to cost and B, how to implement all those different types of things.”
The sprawling complex of brick buildings dates back to 1808, and was an active paper mill for 200 years before its closure.
Buchanan said the Eagle Mill team is largely avoiding testing the sediment of the Housatonic. The waterway polluted by a General Electric plant in Pittsfield during the 20th century is already the subject of a controversial massive, multi-million-dollar cleanup that’s dominated local conversation since it was announced in 2020.
“Sediment was looked at a little bit, but it's going to be continued as part of the EPA Housatonic River investigations," Buchanan explained. "They're doing a lot of work, as I'm sure most people are aware, in the river, for cleanup for stuff that happened upriver, and we didn't want to disturb that as part of our investigations, and we didn't want to put, you know, have two phases of cleanup for stuff that that is going to be done on a larger scale, so that that has sort of been not looked at this time, but also the development plans, as we'll talk a little bit more later, do not provide access to the river, so the sediment is not going to be available to the public through this site.”
While the results of groundwater testing did not warrant remediation, soil samples told a different story.
“There are two overlapping areas with lead and volatile petroleum hydrocarbons at the site that require an Activity [and] Use Limitation, which basically sets rules to make sure that people can't come in contact with those contaminations, limitations on what can be developed and how it has to be developed in those areas,” said Buchanan.
Buchanan assured local leaders the chemicals are not affecting the town’s water supply.
“The lead is not leaching very much with groundwater flow and stuff like that," he said. "There is some pavement there that does inhibit the flow a little bit, but the lead will stick around. The lead is not going to move very much, and that's not an issue. As we saw, there's, as I said, there's nothing in the groundwater above concentration. So, these things aren't going into the groundwater and impacting the Housatonic River. The vPH items are there. They're slowly getting broken down by the biota in the nature, but it takes a long time for that to clean up.”
Buchanan said developers have opted for a cleanup plan that would take action on the dangerous chemicals while leaving the current Activity and Use Limitations or “AULs” in place in contaminated sites.
“We're abating the asbestos, we're taking care of the lead based paint, getting rid of all the hazardous chemicals that are on on the site, that are in the building, materials, leaving the AULs in place, except for limited areas where they need to," he said. "I know we're putting in some utility corridors, buried utilities, and we're looking at that soil to see if we can reuse it or if there's a danger to people that would have to access those utility corridors in the future, and then replacing that with clean soil that wouldn't slow down those needs in the future.”
Some progress has already been made on the Eagle Mill cleanup.
“All the asbestos abatement has occurred, that has been approved by Mass DEP and tested to make sure that the areas are clean," said Buchanan. "So, the asbestos abatement is is complete. I believe they're still doing a little bit of the lead-based paint removal in some areas in the buildings.”
Eagle Mill has received millions in state and federal tax credits and grants toward its opening.
The first phase of construction – building 56 apartments and developing the factory machine shop into commercial and office space – was originally forecast to be finished by late 2023. Phase two, with two new apartment buildings, 66 additional apartments, and six condominium townhouses, had been intended to be completed by 2025.
