How Macon cleaned up contaminated land to make room for new Mercer medical school
The site on Riverside Drive where Mercer University plans to build its new medical school went undeveloped for decades. Why has it sat idle for so long, and why is construction advancing now?
The site, 815 Riverside Drive, was once a manufactured gas plant in the early 20th century, leaving behind contaminants including lead, arsenic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, according to a cleanup plan, called a Voluntary Investigation and Remediation Plan that was prepared for Macon-Bibb County.
In order to bring any new development to the property, the county had to clean the contamination up in order to protect public health and the environment. In this case, the process took nearly two decades. The lands that previously saw industrial use and now have potential contaminants are called “brownfield” properties.
“Cleaning up contaminants on a brownfield reduces or eliminates potential health risks to residents, workers, pets and the surrounding environment,” the Environmental Protection Agency says on its website. “The risk of future exposure to contaminants may be greater for residents and workers who will spend much of their time living or working there. Children, elderly, pregnant women and occupants who are ill can be especially sensitive to contaminants.”
The state’s Environmental Protection Division approved a cleanup plan, called a Corrective Action Plan, for the gas plant site in 2006, which required a legal notice to be added to the property’s deed so that future owners would know about the site’s contamination and restrictions.
In 2011, the state’s environmental protection division removed the property from the Hazardous Site Inventory list because their review showed that groundwater on the site met the strictest cleanup level, known as Type 1, which is the standard Georgia uses for drinking-water safety. A review also showed that the soil on the land met Type 4 standards, which are the state’s acceptable risk limits for industrial or commercial land uses, according to the site’s Voluntary Investigation and Remediation Plan.
A few years later in 2014, a development group had planned a “huge, upscale mixed-use project” on the site, but the deal fell through in December 2013 when the state environmental restrictions were discovered, barring some of the site from residential use, according to prior reporting from The Telegraph.
A year later, Macon-Bibb County took steps to begin remediation of the property to see if it could eventually support residential or mixed-use redevelopment.
That year, the county hired Geotechnical and Environmental Consultants to take a fresh look at the property and determine whether the land could ever be developed for new uses and what additional testing would be required. County records show that the consultants advised doing new testing deeper in the ground to see whether contamination remained below the surface that would make residential use unsafe.
Environmental consultants noted that all the contamination may not have come from the gas plant itself, but that some likely came from fill dirt and construction materials deposited over the years as the site was leveled, according to the voluntary remediation plan.
After further sampling, GEC prepared a formal application to enroll the site in Georgia’s Voluntary Remediation Program in February 2015.
The application proposed digging deep test holes in the soil, identifying contaminants that remained above residential cleanup standards and outlining what corrective work would be needed if the county hoped to seek more flexible land-use approvals.
State environmental regulators reviewed and eventually signed off on the county’s updated cleanup plan for the old gas plant site which marked the first real step toward exploring whether the property could ever be cleaned to a level safe enough for homes or other residential development, rather than just industrial use.
As part of the redevelopment effort, Macon-Bibb County secured a $400,000 EPA Brownfields grant in 2015 to conduct environmental assessments of the Downtown Industrial District, including the Riverside Drive site, helping to lay the groundwork for more intensive remediation.
In 2016, the Macon-Bibb County commission approved spending more than $36,000 to remove hazardous soil from the old gas plant that prevented residential use on the property, according to an article from WMAZ.
In order to clean the Riverside Drive site, it underwent excavating and replacing contaminated soil, manual extraction of petroleum residues from groundwater, and allowing natural processes to break down leftover volatile organic compounds under close monitoring.
In 2019, the site was considered cleaned up, according to an article from WGXA.
Macon-Bibb transferred its portion of the property back to the Urban Development Authority, which then sold the land to Mercer University for its new medical school campus in February.
The broader assembly of properties along Riverside Drive began in the early 1990s as a partnership among the City of Macon, Bibb County, the Peyton Anderson Foundation, NewTown Macon and the Urban Development Authority.
The assembly was completed in 2011, according to the UDA, and the county subsequently assumed control of the land for environmental management before returning it to the authority for economic development.
