FORT PIERCE – Former H.D. King Power Station is white enough to become a park, but not enough for the design of hotels, shops, restaurants and houses that come to town with the $8 million King’s Landing project.
It would charge the city up to $170,000 to make the 8-acre site blank enough for the assignment to be transmitted.
A three-dimensional radar entering the circumference has uncovered the old calculated exits of a power plant, Indian River lagoon water intake ducts, and quantities of garage tanks buried between five and ten feet below the surface, said Dale Matteson, president and CEO of Audubon Development, which the city chose last year to build a 120-room “high-end” hotel from a chain across the country , 60 condos, 40,000 square feet of retail stores and two on-site restaurants.
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“You prefer a hotel and we build you a hotel, but we can’t do it until it’s usual,” Matteson told TCPalm on Wednesday. “If the city dreams of a park or houses, the ground is quite productive for that. But for a hotel, stilts have to sink deep into the circular and can’t go into the circular with that thing there.”
The City Commission, in its role as Fort Pierce’s disapproval agency, voted Tuesday 3-2 to pay for the removal of infracircular structures in the northern aspect of the site.
“We’re not asking for money,” Matteson said. “We ask the city to give us what has been announced: a blank, progressive site. That’s not what they’ve given us right now.”
But the city’s commissioners, Rufus Alexander and Reggie Sessions, objected to the city paying something. This cleanup was done through the Public Service Authority of Fort Pierce, which owned the land and operated the power plant there.
“We don’t seem to be in the utility industry,” Sessions said at the meeting. “And now you have to pay for the cleaning of the property? Whoever qualified the site’s preference was guilty of cleaning it up.”
However, the buried structures have not come as a surprise, said John Tompeck, director of FPUA. The people knew it, he said.
“FPUA has fulfilled all its obligations to demolish the plant and remedy the site,” Tompeck said in an email to TCPalm. “All additional costs must be covered through (the reproach agency) or the developer.”
For decades, valuables, on Second Street, between Indian River Drive and AE Backus Avenue, housed the city’s power plant, which was demolished in 2008. The City and the Fort Pierce Public Utilities Authority spent more than $4.2 billion directly to dump 34,000 tons of infected land. arsenic, lead, oil and other chemicals.
The State Department of Environmental Protection verified that the site was cleared blank.
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When the city and FPUA agreed to demolish the plant, they agreed to remove all equipment, structures and foundations up to four feet below the surface, as there was no transparent plan on how the site would be redeveloped, Tompeck said.
“It costs nothing in the removal of those structures,” Tompeck said. “When the demolition specification evolved in 2007, there was no plan for long-term use of the site,” Tompeck said.
“The people and the FPUA agreed that it was prudent to remove all structures four feet below (from the surface). Additional structures were given within four feet during the environmental remediation phase of the project, but subcircular structures remain.
The site was considered to be cleaned at an intensity of more than four feet, but considerations were expressed about the influence of the paintings on Moore’s Creek Dam.
“Significant (work) would have been needed, and groundwater condition, pollution, was not known,” Tompeck said. “Additional excavations would also have influenced the integrity of the dam along Moore Creek. This was replaced several years after the demolition was completed.
Keona Gardner covers the cities of Port St. Lucia and Fort Pierce and St. Lucia County. Contact her at 772-221-4206 or [email protected] with news suggestions.
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