Clarke and Pine

One day in the mid-1990s I was working through lunch, and happened to take a call from someone looking for a qualifications package for mitigation-related work. I sent it off right away, within perhaps 15 minutes. Another 15 minutes and the fellow called back. I'd been the first to respond, the quals looked good, and could I be at a meeting with the Justice Department the next morning?

I could, and I was. Today that might be impossible, but our management structure at TAMS was so flat, our ability to take responsibility so complete and so encouraged, that I didn't need to wait for a signed contract. There was an opportunity, and I took it. The paperwork followed.

The "client" turned out to be a large group of "potentially responsible parties" or PRPs related to the MIDCO superfund sites in Gary, Indiana. I never learned who they were, although I was told it was a who's who of the Fortune 500. They'd shipped things to these sites, some low-level staffer hadn't done his due diligence first, the fly-by-night operator had buried and then burned 55 gallon drums of hazardous materials, and USEPA had gone after the folks with the deep pockets after the operator had declared bankruptcy and fled.

In any case my day to day contacts were the attorneys representing the PRPs. Some of them were brilliant, many relatively young, and they were working on things that in some cases had no established precedent. In my case though the task was straightforward, if far from simple: Identify a way to mitigate wetlands filled as part of the illegal dumping. The knowledge I'd gained of the Gary area as part of the airport study proved to be invaluable.

First we had to quantify the historic impacts. I stood outside the fence along U.S. Route 12 as two of my team members in full tyvek hazmat gear delineated remaining wetlands inside the sites. Then we digitized vegetation cover from old aerial photos and compared 1970s and current layers to determine the area of fill. Then back into more meetings with lawyers, ours and theirs, 40 stories above downtown Chicago.

The amount of mitigation needed was large enough that there were few places to consolidate it. There are a lot of remnant dune and swale natural areas in and around Gary, but few of them exceed 10 or 20 acres. There's quite a bit of adjacent disturbed land, buffer areas that in most places could be excavated to re-establish wetlands. In Gary though digging is risky. One never knows what might be buried there, amidst the steel mills there is a lot of undocumented hazardous material. Even the fill itself can be a problem, often it's fly ash or steel slag which needs to be disposed of in a licensed landfill with all the associated transport and disposal costs.

At that time USEPA didn't usually accept land preservation as mitigation for this sort of thing, at least not as more than a small part of the package. However I knew that the single most important piece of land in the project vicinity, from a conservation standpoint, was the 220-acre Clarke and Pine East parcel. We'd sampled it during the airport study and knew that it, along with the smaller Clark and Pine nature preserve across the street and Lakeshore Railroad Prairie just to the north, contained possibly the largest aggregation of state-listed species in Indiana. We knew that Indiana DNR wanted it, and that they'd been unable to get the owner - a guy who ran a local trucking company - to even return phone calls.

With lots of help from Indiana DNR's Division of Nature Preserves, we convinced the Justice Department lawyers to let us try to acquire Clarke and Pine East as natural resource damage mitigation. The pressure from the state agency was essential to the agreement.

In a way, that was the easy part, it took only about a dozen weekly meetings among the lawyers. Beyond that, we knew the landowner was under a cease and desist order from the Corps of Engineers as a result of some attempted sand mining in wetlands a few years earlier. We knew he was delinquent on taxes, and the fallback was the tax sale and then waiting two years.

The hotshot lawyers hired a local family law guy in Hammond to contact the landowner; obviously being approached by high-end corporate attorneys would lead to a higher  asking price. The local guy accomplished what the agencies couldn't and established contact, but the price was much too high, 10 times fair market value. Ironically, the owner had believed that the Gary site we'd studied for the airport was real, thought he was sitting on valuable land. Of course that site had never been viable for an airport, it would have displaced 40,000 people and cost billions just to remediate the hazardous waste, and it was dotted with wetlands that couldn't be mitigated and endangered species. It had been assessed and discarded, but he didn't know or understand that.

I don't know what the lawyers found in that guys closet and dragged out. I probably don't ever want to know. What I do know is that overnight, the asking price dropped to fair market value. The lawyers brokered the deal, the land briefly went to The Nature Conservancy because they were able to move a little more nimbly on funding, and about a year later the land was transferred to the Division of Nature Preserves. Coincidentally about that time I was returning from a meeting somewhere to the east and stopped to visit the Director of that division, John Bacone, in Indianapolis. He said "guess what came today" and handed me the deed to Clarke and Pine East.

We'd just saved the largest remaining example of lakeshore ridge and swale in Indiana, a place contiguous with two other smaller examples and divided only by roads and railroads. A place where jack pine reached it's southernmost extent and grew among scattered black oak and an amazing diversity of sand prairie and wetland plants, including many rare species. A place where lizards typical of places well to the southwest met species of eastern and northern origin. A place studied and discussed at length by Victor Shelford in his "Animal Communities in Temperate America" (1913). I believe it's perhaps the single most important thing I've accomplished in my 24 year career.

In this case others did the restoration, although the deal included some funding to begin that work. Later I'd work closely with some of those same folks to write a collection of ecological knowledge... what could easily be called the ecology of the Grand Calumet watershed... which would later be published in the Transactions of the Indiana Academy of Sciences. Those papers were written, with Corps of Engineers funding, to help identify yet more restoration opportunities. The story is still a work in progress, and I'll revisit yet one more chapter in a future post.