THE PROVINCE is spending $260,000 to help clean up two local properties affected by industrial or commercial use.
The grants come from a provincial program aimed at ridding properties of pollutants so they become usable again.
Privately-owned NSD Development Corporation is getting $165,042.43 to continue determining what’s in the ground on property west of Kenney and bounded by Keith to the south and CN’s rail tracks to the north.
It once acted as the log yard for a sawmill, since dismantled, that was east of Kenney toward the Sande Overpass, but had other industrial uses as well.
The land has now been renamed the North Coast Industrial Park and NSD Developments did obtain a development permit from the city for a portion of the property it had cleared near a rail spur this spring.
The spur is located near Blakeburn Ave.
But initial development plans were halted when a site investigation determined that burning of waste wood there over the years was a cause for concern.
“They had a diesel-powered sawmill and fuel and tanks but no record of what they did with that stuff,” added city planner David Block of material and equipment once at the location.
“[The new owners] had to complete a site profile ... which identified some of the issues with that property,” he said.
NSD bought the property in 2009 from the city which obtained it to satisfy unpaid property taxes and an unpaid loan owed by the Terrace Lumber Company, the last company to operate the now-dismantled sawmill.
NSD’s property isn’t the only one in the city where taxpayer dollars are leading to a clean up.
The city is getting $96,309 for work on the corner of Greig and Kalum which once contained a gas station that was part of the Terrace Co-operative Association’s shopping centre there. The shopping centre has since been demolished.
“The funding now is to further assess where that service station contamination is,” said Block of the Co-op property.
The Co-op property is now owned by the city and it has divided it into lots for sale but will first need to investigate the site to see where to draw lines around potentially polluted areas.
The grant will be used to see what, if any, problems there are with that portion of the lot and then make recommendations for how to clean it up.
Block said the Vanderhoof Co-op, which took over the assets of the Terrace Co-op when it folded, remains responsible for the actual clean up of anything that’s found.
Depending on how the northeast corner of the site eventually cleans up, it may only have limited uses for the future such as a parking lot or garden space, said Block.