City Council Accepts Park District's Request at Sportsman's Park
Posted at 3:17 AM on June 25, 2011
On Tuesday June 21st the Naperville City Council as landowners of Sportsman's Park agreed by unanimous vote to accept the Park District's request to work with the IEPA on Sportsman's Park remediation. Changes at the park could be seen starting in 2012. Reliable sources have indicated for some time that the situation at Sportsman’s Park is more complicated than it appears. Although we have no reason to believe the Park District’s trapshooting program facilitated by the Naperville Sportsman’s Club will be affected as a result of this decision at this time or in the near future, remediation could prove costly and complicated.
A post on the Naperville Park District’s website reads as follows as of June 21st:
“The Park District is asking the City of Naperville to voluntarily participate with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) Site Remediation Program (SRP) to perform an environmental assessment and remediation of the Sportsman’s Park facility. The objective of these activities is to obtain a No Further Remediation (NFR) determination from the IEPA SRP and the continued use of the site for the Sportsman’s Club and other Naperville Park District activities.”
In this context, it is important to point out that the IEPA permit allowing the facility to operate today already includes a No Further Remediation determination dating back to the federal lawsuit that caused a temporary interruption in the trapshooting program in the late 1990’s. The NFR remains valid provided the facility continues as a trapshooting range. What then is this all about, especially since the stated goal seems to be already accomplished?
Again, according to the NPD website:
“The NPD is asking the City of Naperville to undertake this now as the logical next step in the stewardship of Sportsman’s Park. A number of the preventative measures installed to protect the public and wildlife are nearing the end of their lifecycles and will, over the next 10 years, require extensive maintenance and replacement. Those resources are, instead, being devoted to studying and removing the underlying reasons for the existence of the preventative measures in the first place. Moreover, in the time since the preventative measures were first introduced, science and technology for understanding and remedying the issues have advanced so that they can now be undertaken with less impact on the public’s use of Sportsman’s Park or the surrounding facilities.”
The information given by the NPD makes it unequivocally clear that the facility is currently safe, has always been safe and that groundwater in the surrounding area, including the wells of adjacent homeowners, is not contaminated by lead or anything else. Although not stated, overwhelming IEPA evidence exists demonstrating the lead in the soil (as a result of trapshooting activities) is inert and not soluble at the location.
So the question once again is why the NPD is so concerned about the resources devoted to preventative measures?
The short answer to this is the monitoring required by the IEPA is an ongoing effort that burdens the NPD. The next logical question is why this is so, when so much testing has already shown the park is safe?
Remediation has always been a tricky question. It sounds like a good idea, but has typically been an invasive process that puts the natural character of an area at extreme risk. It will be important to see what new advances in remediation technology now make the process viable with “less impact” to the public’s use of the surrounding areas. The WSGPC of course is also very concerned about the surrounding areas.