A RIBBON through bleakness, the latest installment of the Hohokam Expressway snakes up from the south, fording the Salt River. It gathers momentum, sending exit ramps diving for Sky Harbor International Airport and Washington Street, and seems to promise a shot at Camelback Mountain before merging into McDowell Road.
Like all freeways, the Hohokam, focuses its travelers on the destination rather than the journey. It is unsafe and unnecessary to try to take in the scenery, and frankly, there is not much to see beyond the expressway's own sculpted, elevated shoulders. Looking down to the east, a little south of Washington Street, there are unsightly hills of dirt and a rusted husk of what once may have been a grain elevator. This nondescript plot of land is surrounded by a dull wire fence.
Gene Gabrielli used to own this land before the state took it from him to build the freeway. Though he denies it, Gabrielli thought he stood to make a little profit when he found out his business was in the path of the bulldozers.
Instead he has endured years of legal anguish and wrecked finances. Not only didn't he make a profit from the sale of his land, the state offered him roughly $100,000 less than he had paid for it six years before. Because of the difficulties in finding a proper site on which to relocate, he hasn't been able to operate his business for two years. And worst of all, Arizona authorities want to bill him for what could be more than $1 million to clean up a toxic-waste spill he did not create, one that probably would have never occurred had the state followed established guidelines for environmental assessments before it built the Hohokam Expressway.
Environmental hazards are a relatively new variable in the real estate business. Because of the vast amounts of pollution present in Arizona's real estate, however, it's a problem you're going to be hearing about more often. During the past 20 years or so, a body of laws and regulations has evolved to manage this new area of risks. One of the pro forma rituals of a modern land transaction is the performance of a study to determine whether, based on past use, a parcel is likely to become an environmental problem in the future. Ordinarily, these studies are conducted at the behest of a prospective buyer hoping to indemnify himself against cleanup liability. These studies may be as brief as a quick look-see on the land, or if an engineer suspects a lot's history, or if present use suggests the possible presence of nasty chemicals under the ground, then more complex research-core samples, hydrological studies-may be undertaken as a precaution.
In the case of Gene Gabrielli's land, the state ordered only a limited audit, a study as cursory as a walk around the property, and did not proceed to a more extensive examination until after a spill had been created. ²Although the state admits it caused the spill, either through negligence or lack of foresight, Arizona claims that Gabrielli is liable for the cleanup. The cost is expected to climb to $1 million. The Arizona Department of Transportation holds that what has happened to Gabrielli is just one of the unfortunate, unavoidable things that can happen when highways are built in haste.
And that's how we build them around here.
Roads like the Hohokam Expressway are a relatively new phenomenon to the Valley of the Sun. Local residents have been slow to embrace the advantages of clean, unencumbered paths through town. While cities in other parts of the country were girding themselves with beltways and outer loops, the Valley clung stubbornly to its stoplight-clogged arterial road system. In Arizona, freeways were seen as unnecessary, impersonal people-movers tracking through the country oblivious to any sense of place. Worse yet, they were seen as a threat to the quality of life enjoyed by Phoenicians who were determined not to turn their city into Ôanother Los Angeles." Part of the reason some were attracted to Phoenix was its manageable scale and insulation from civilization; plenty of new Valley residents were willing to shut the door behind them" after they settled in their arid homeland.
Unfortunately, they forgot to tell the economic development guys," Dan Galvin of the Arizona Department of Transportation says. They kept bringing in industry, and people follow the jobs."
Galvin, ADOT's director of community relations, has the slightly clerical look of a young congressman's aide, the sort of earnest level gaze that inspires confidence in bartenders and police detectives. It falls to him to explain why it's so hard to get from one end of Maricopa County to the other.
The concern was that we didn't want to become another big, ugly city," he begins. Taxpayers voted down a number of issues that would have funded highway construction...in the mid-1970s the Arizona Republic was running editorials urging people to vote `no' on [freeway proposals.] People just didn't want it."
Incredible population growth in the 1970s coupled with a political climate hostile to paying taxes to fund highway- construction projects have produced a unique set of circumstances for Phoenix and its surrounding communities. For the first time in history, highway planners are trying to retrofit a major metropolis with a freeway system. Instead of building roads through the boondocks and letting the city grow up around them, ADOT is frantically trying to stay ahead of gridlock by building highways through an urban environment.
It wasn't until 1985 when Maricopa County voters approved a half-cent sales-tax increase, designed to raise $5.8 billion over 20 years, that work on a 231-mile Valleywide freeway system began. Six years later, that system is about 10 percent complete and more than $1.2 billion over its projected budget. While voters will get a chance to add another half-cent dedicated to freeway construction in November and ADOT is exploring alternative methods of raising highway-building funds such as privatization and the use of toll roads, Galvin says that under current funding conditions, ADOT will be able to complete only about 50 more miles of highway before the year 2006.
There probably has never been a construction project like this in the history of the world," Galvin says. Certainly there's never been one like it in this country." Building under construction schedule pressure through populated areas is an expensive proposition. And sometimes, it makes bad things happen. Everyone involved concedes that what happened when the Hohokam Expressway was extended northward, through a triangular, 6.5-acre parcel of land owned by Gene Gabrielli was an atrocity.
Galvin approaches the problem with disarming, fatalistic frankness. That's the price of building freeways in a hurry," he says.
BARBED WIRE TOPS the rented fence that prevents the law-abiding from walking onto part of what ADOT employees call the Gabrielli property." Attached to the fence are bilingual signs to warn the unauthorized away, and beyond them piles of excavated earth are partially covered by black plastic tarp. Between these mounds, a few sooty tires have settled into a fine silt that turns dusky pink in the fading sunlight.
Along the south end of what ADOT has designated Parcel No. 7-5925 rises a conspicuous structure of corrugated steel. It is a long building with a pitched roof, running 222 feet from east to west and 60 feet deep. In places, its ruffled skin has been peeled away to reveal a rusted skeleton and more dirt packed inside. For most of its length, the building is approximately two stories high, but its west-end supports an elevator visible from more than a mile away. On the tower is painted, in flat orange and white, an eagle's head in profile above the legend Mathieson." You can't miss it.
All that dirt is, to some degree, soaked in pesticide. The dirt inside the building, sheltered from the rain, is thought to be the most severely contaminated. When the state Department of Environmental Quality sends out its workers to refit the plastic shroud, they are required to wear moon suits," protective clothing that covers them from head to foot. It is costly to keep the dirt here, and it will be even more costly to move it. Recent tests indicate the dirt is not as contaminated as was first thought. That is good news. Instead of cleanup costs of more than $3 million, it may cost only $1 million to haul the dirt away.
This dirt was taken from directly beneath the overpass that supports the Hohokam a few yards away. When construction workers began building the expressway in September 1990, they removed a concrete pad that covered a sump in the expressway's path. Almost immediately, the air was saturated with the sweet-sick odor of DDT. A few workers became ill. Work stopped. Tom Sullivan, the hazardous material coordinator for ADOT's environmental planning divisions, was called in to do an assessment.
Sullivan is a burly, hirsute guy with a Brooklyn accent tempered by 35 years out West. He says that a week or so before the crew hit the sump, workers on a new crosscut canal just a few yards east of the freeway construction noticed a funny smell.
We went out and-real scientific-sniffed it a couple of times," Sullivan says. It smelled like the stuff I had in my garden."
But tests showed the concentrations of pesticides were so low that no action was required. Work continued on both projects on the Gabrielli land, though a safety officer from Tanner Construction, the contractor actually building the freeway, privately expressed his concerns to Sullivan.
But when they ripped the cap off that sump, it was Katy-bar-the-door," Sullivan says. It was immediately obvious that we were dealing with some high concentrations. So we roped it all off and backed off construction."
Subsequent core samples revealed dangerously high levels of four different pesticides in the path of the Hohokam, near the Grand Canal.
Here is where the faded eagle on the elevator becomes important. For more than 40 years, it has looked down from its perch, north across Washington Street. It is a trademark of Olin Mathieson, the giant chemical company that operated a pesticide and fertilizer formulation plant on the site from 1950 to 1972.
But nobody ordered a complete environmental impact study for Parcel No. 7-5925 before construction work started on that part of the Hohokam Expressway. Even though ADOT had a title search that went back to when the land was patented in the 19th century, which showed the chemical company had owned the land, the only environmental workup conducted before the state hit the sump was a Phase I Environmental Audit." It was conducted by the environmental consulting firm of Scott, Allard and Bohannan, Inc., in November 1988.
This Phase I audit was based on visual observation of soils, construction materials, and equipment" and amounted to little more than a stroll around the property.
Observations were made at random to characterize the general conditions and material use in an area, and do not represent complete observation of all materials," the report reads. Concealed materials were not observed. Concrete slabs, soils or other construction details which may have concealed hazardous substances were not destructively removed to allow observation."
Although the assessment notes the presence of a concrete slab, a slab Gabrielli says he pointed out to the engineers examining the property and that was directly in the path of the proposed expressway, no one went further to check what lay beneath it. Gabrielli says he thought the slab might have been the foundation for an old building, but in any case, he assumed the environmental engineers knew what they were doing.
Not only did the state's experts ignore the sump, they ignored the history of the area which was long associated with cattle pens and feedlots. Two other environmental consultants contacted said the area around Gabrielli's property was Ônotorious" for environmental problems and that the nearby East Papago Freeway was changed from an at grade" structure to an elevated freeway to minimize potential problems. A railroad spur that ran along the southern edge of the Gabrielli property should also have aroused some suspicions, these consultants said.
The 1988 report on the Gabrielli property further notes that the limited scope of activity authorized under the Phase I scope of work did not include the investigation of subsurface soil or groundwater contamination."
part 1 of 4
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK THE HOHOKAM FRE... v4-08-92
