Larry A. Rosenthal

Contaminated sediments in rivers, lakes, and harbors around the world result in diminished ecological health, degradation of environmental resources, economic losses, and, in rare cases, impacts to human health. Despite the ongoing interest in the cleanup of contaminated sediments in rivers and harbors, little progress has been made in reducing the number of contaminated sites worldwide. Much of the difficulty in advancing this cause can be attributed to the high cost of sediment cleanups and the difficulty in assigning financial responsibility for the cost of the cleanup. Simple schemes dependent on identifying polluters are fraught with underlying complexity. More elaborate approaches tied in with waterfront redevelopment show some promise but are yet to be applied routinely. New advances in the understanding of how sediments may, or may not, factor into circularity pose new challenges and opportunities, with the potential to complement new funding paradigms. The most promising possibilities for achieving circularity in sediment management lie in a kind of “punctuated circularity,” which requires idiosyncratic, project-based beneficial use opportunities. However, these ideal situations are likely to remain rare for the foreseeable future, without advancements in technology and regulatory approaches, as well as development of market demand for the products made from contaminated sediments.

Contaminated sediments pose significant ecological and health threats in ports and harbors around the world. Yet there is surprisingly little progress towards cleanup in most countries. The U.S. Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA or Superfund law) facilitates cleanup projects but they often suffer lengthy delays nonetheless. Participants debate relative responsibility over cost shares. Project finance is often insufficient, in part because resources are diverted by adversarial legalism (Spadaro and Rosenthal 2003, Kagan 2001).

Technologies of sediment remediation (e.g., precision dredging, engineered cap placement, natural attenuation) can now address even the most significant contamination. These innovations allow increasing economies of operation and simplification of remediation design. Applying these technologies in risk-based proportions has produced significant successes, but far too few given the enormity of the challenge worldwide. Without innovations in funding, improved project coordination, and coherent waterfront planning, greater progress will remain difficult to achieve.

We analyze relationships between waterway cleanup of contaminated sediments and waterfront redevelopment. Using examples from North America, we evaluate possible changes in funding paradigms that, if implemented, could accelerate reclamation and remediation. We question the efficacy of the 100-percent-polluter-pays model currently employed in cleanups under the Superfund program and state-equivalent models. Despite its compensatory logic, polluter-pays has difficulty securing polluters’ participation and attributing proportions of contamination to original sources.

Further, historic polluters often lack roots in the present-day community, aiming primarily to minimize their financial exposure. By contrast, longer-term interests in waterways and on the waterfront—e.g. municipal governments, port authorities, and community organizations—can play leadership roles via planning, development regulation, and uplands remediation. Though these entities ought bear no more than their fair share of the costs, they should help coordinate the process whenever possible, given their naturally occurring stakes in cleanup and revitalization.

We propose new roles for cleanup authorities and new structures in project-finance. Tax-increment investment and other approaches can salvage public value and limit windfalls for speculators. Better funding and planning methods enhance local control over these projects and their outcomes. Importantly, new approaches can reduce levels of community displacement, as property values rise when cleanup succeeds.

Without such coordination of waterway-waterfront cleanup and redevelopment in the public interest, significant opportunities are lost. Through enlightened practices, perhaps spurred by positive regulation and negotiated solutions emphasizing local constituencies, greater numbers of effective cleanup projects providing meaningful community benefits become possible.

Keywords: Redevelopment, Municipality, Port Authority, Superfund, Funding

This paper will be presented at the WODCON XXII meetings in Shanghai, China in April of 2019. 

A series of municipal bankruptcies across the United States during and after the financial crisis of 2007-2008 revealed the need for a better understanding of the many factors that shape cities’ fiscal operating environments and solvency conditions. The larger project this study is part of focuses on the role of real estate price changes in the spending and revenues of local governments, examining specifically the issue of irrational exuberance at city hall. We know that property value changes can influence revenue expectations, and ask whether perceptions about future growth conditions may increase propensity to commit to spending revenue that might not materialize. One understudied aspect of this hypothesis is the way in which local governments of various structures process information about local real estate market conditions and revenue expectations. In work completed recently, we analyzed how city councils and fiscal managers learn about real estate market conditions. We found that cities see themselves as budgeting conservatively, and that the housing boom and bust was secondary to declines in sales tax and other revenues during the recession. In this paper, we extend the inquiry to cover the bankruptcies of San Bernardino, Vallejo, and Stockton, CA. We explore these cases relying upon contemporaneous news reports and commentaries, as well as background sources providing municipal history. While exuberance may set the stage for the very extreme policy choice to seek Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection, we find that the perceptions of local administrators and lawmakers relative to economic growth and revenue expectations alone were likely not sufficient to predict, or explain, these cases. Instead, a number of political, budgetary, and financial factors must coincide in order to place leaders and managers into the kind of predicaments which place bankruptcy on the table as a rational, if unappetizing, option. 

Nonprofit housing development organizations in the U.S. have played a central role in affordable housing provision for decades, but are now encountering a number of challenges, some of which are arising within the organizations, while others stem from changes in the context in which they carry out their work. Our work in this area constitutes the U.S component of a four‐country study of current and anticipated future challenges and opportunities confronting the nonprofit housing sector. Our previous work reported on the findings from a survey modified from one deployed in England, the Netherlands, and Australia. This chapter summarizes our findings from in‐depth interviews that we carried out with leaders from the 12 organizations in our study in two major metropolitan areas of the US: the Boston and San Francisco Regions.