The City of Durham is working to speed up the timeline for lead remediation in five city parks by hiring a consultant to provide recommendations in the next six months.
Parts of the five parks—Walltown, Lyon, East End, East Durham, and Northgate—have been closed to the public for three years following a Duke University report that found extremely high levels of lead contamination. The report was released in late 2022 but university and city officials didn’t publicly communicate the findings until the following June, leaving residents feeling upset and in the dark about the extent of the contamination, and the impact it could have on them and their families.
On Monday, the Durham City Council voted to contract with A1 Consulting Group to develop a menu of options for lead remediation at four of the five public parks, excluding East End, which is being renovated separately through the 2024 parks bond. A1 Consulting is expected to review soil testing done so far and identify remediation options for each of the parks in the next four-to-six months.
“We’re asking to move quickly because we understand the priority that the city and the community is looking for solutions,” Chris Liszka, a member of Durham’s General Services department, said during a recent work session.
Durham Parks and Recreation has been working with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to create remedial action plans for each of the parks through the state’s Pre-Regulatory Landfill Program, which was established in 2007 to remediate land where governments disposed of solid waste before 1983.
DEQ has spent the last three years testing the soil at all five parks. Liszka said the city expects remediation plans from DEQ for Lyon Park and Walltown Park within the month.
DEQ has recommended cap-and-cover, or soil capping, as its preferred option for pre-regulatory landfill sites, a method in which the contaminated area is sealed underground (for Durham’s parks, that could look like placing a soccer field or basketball court on top.) The City of Durham is hiring A1 Consulting “to explore additional remediation strategies to evaluate and compare impacts and costs that can be shared with the community,” according to a city memo.
While cap-and-cover would be the least expensive option, according to preliminary estimates by DEQ and city staff, the city could also consider full or partial removal of the contaminated soil. A1 will also be tasked with identifying discrepancies and gaps in the testing done so far that may affect remediation decisions, according to the contract, which totals about $670,000.
“They’re going to help us to develop those options, cost estimate those options, and evaluate our risks and the pros and cons to each of those options for you all to make the informed decision on what is best to move forward,” Liszka told the city council.
Last year, the city added $12 million to its Capital Improvement Plan for lead remediation efforts. City Manager Bo Ferguson said during the October 8 work session that the state also has funding available for Durham’s lead remediation efforts, due in part to advocacy from Durham’s lobbyists in the state legislature. Regardless of what remediation method the city chooses to follow, $12 million won’t be enough to cover all five parks.
“The $12 million that we have set aside was always intended to be a bit of a placeholder and that we never really could presume what a full budget would look like,” Ferguson said.
At East End Park, the cost of removing contaminated soil is roughly $10.8 million, staff said, whereas the cap-and-cover method would only cost $4 million. But the city isn’t just looking at lead remediation. Similar to the renovations happening at East End and Long Meadow Park through the 2024 bond, Ferguson said that making broader improvements to each park is a possibility, but would increase the overall cost.
“If we’re going into these parks, especially these parks that have been closed for a number of years, let’s try and leave them better than we found them, not just reopen them,” Ferguson said. “But the ability to do that, the scale at which we could do that will certainly be funding dependent.”
Councilmember Chelsea Cook, who teaches at Duke, said during the work session that they and their students noticed a troubling correlation between historical redlining and lead contamination today during a recent class discussion; The waste sites where the parks are now located directly map onto areas of Durham that Black families were forced to live in because of housing discrimination.
“We’re feeling the impacts not only of this redlining, which has totally devastated some of our neighborhoods in Durham and allowed wealth to be hoarded in other neighborhoods,” Cook said, “… but we also see it in very real health consequences and that’s been passed down, too.”
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