State Senator Jamilah Nasheed (D-St. Louis) challenged Gov. Jay Nixon to take “immediate action” to clean up the former Pruitt-Igoe site in North St. Louis by approving Brownfield Remediation Tax Credits.
She made the request in a letter dated April 26 that was copied to the directors of the Missouri Department of Economic Development and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.
“The director of the Department of Natural Resources together with the director of the Department of Economic Development must approve all applications for the Brownfields tax credits needed for the clean-up of the Pruitt-Igoe site,” Nasheed wrote.
“As the governor, you oversee both of these departments. I urge you to do all in your power to ensure that any application for Brownfield Remediation Tax Credit program be approved for use by the Pruitt-Igoe site.”
According to the Missouri Department of Economic Development, the Brownfield tax credit is designed to provide “financial incentives for the redevelopment of commercial/industrial sites that are contaminated with hazardous substances and have been abandoned or underutilized for at least three years.” The Pruitt-Igoe site is contaminated with asbestos and – reportedly – radiation from covert U.S. Army experiments. It has been abandoned for 40 years.
“The Pruitt-Igoe site falls well within” the stated purpose of the tax credit, Nasheed wrote, “and I ask you to take immediate action to expedite the use of the Brownfield Remediation Tax Credit program to clean up the site.”
According to an estimate by Lafser & Associates, it will cost nearly $17 million to remediate the site.
The Pruitt-Igoe footprint was included in the original proposal to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) for its new $1.6 billion Western Headquarters that was submitted by developers Paul McKee Jr. of NorthSide Regeneration, who controls the site, and Bob Clark of ClayCo. In the end, the NGA drew the Pruitt-Igoe ground out of the site where it proposes to build its new Western Headquarters, though the contaminated land is adjacent.
The Belleville News-Democrat – which editorialized in favor of the NGA choosing a rival site in St. Clair County, Illinois – surmises that the NGA excluded this ground because of its toxic pollution and continues to argue that the North St. Louis site is unsafe for the federal agency because of the adjacent toxicity. The NGA has a public review period for its decision until May 2.
