Federal regulators approved a controversial land swap and golf development without full knowledge of the contamination on land involved, warn opponents of the privatization of Benton Harbor’s Jean Klock Park. They are asking the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to revoke the project’s permits while it considers the new information.

“This is about Whirlpool appropriating a 92-year-old Lake Michigan lakefront park and foisting its polluted white elephant on the public rolls in exchange,” said Benton Harbor resident Julie Weiss who is also a plaintiff in a pending federal suit to block the project.

In the name of economic development, Harbor Shores Community Redevelopment Inc., a non-profit affiliated with the locally headquartered Whirlpool Corp., is in the process of building a Jack Nicklaus Signature golf course on land that includes Jean Klock Park. Developers plan to put three holes of the course atop the park’s sand dunes so that golfers may experience majestic Lake Michigan views.

The plan has been criticized on social justice, economic and environmental grounds. Benton Harbor is one of the poorest cities in the country. U.S. census data shows around half of the residents live in poverty, and more than 90 percent are African-American, and the golf course would serve comparatively privileged outsiders while offering few long-term jobs to locals.

The 73-acre Jean Klock Park was donated to townspeople in 1917 and improved with state and federal grants. It features a fragile dune ecosystem, habitat for the threatened Rose-pink flower, and is among the few remaining large tracts of open public land on Lake Michigan. It is a treasured recreational spot and the major public park in a city that’s been devastated by the loss of manufacturing jobs.

To compensate for the project’s reduction of public parkland, developers have promised to create a new bike path and trail system on a string of parcels along the Paw Paw River and around Benton Harbor.

But these properties contain unsafe levels of industrial waste, according to documents recently released by the state in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by project opponents. Critics of the Harbor Shores project say that details of the contamination raise new questions about the propriety of the deal — the land was represented by developers as of equal value to the lakefront park, they say, and creating a construction zone on contaminated land could spread pollution and endanger wetlands.

An April 2, 2007, letter from a hydrologist with the company Earth Tech — stamped “received” by the Department of Environmental Quality on April 5 — states that pollution on the parcels exceeds levels considered safe by the state. The pollutants identified include lead and arsenic, volatile organic compounds and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons.

Later that month, Lorraine Thomas of the Department of Environmental Quality’s Remediation and Redevelopment Division in Kalamazoo told the engineering company working on the project that Harbor Shores, the developer, was not liable to clean up contamination of the parcels.

“Based on proposed future use as a recreational area,” she wrote in an April 20 letter, “the relevant pathways of concern include direct soil contact criteria and ambient air particulate soil-inhalation criteria.” These types of exposures could be addressed, she wrote, by installing an exposure barrier or by excavating the contaminated soil.

This information about the contamination, if released earlier, would have galvanized the environmental community against this project, said attorney Terry Lodge, who is representing a group of residents in a federal suit seeking to block the project.

The Army Corp of Engineers is the agency responsible for regulating the effects of the golf project on wetlands.

In a letter to the Corps this month Lodge wrote:

Contrary to what was disclosed to the public for scrutiny during the pre-application phase in early 2008 by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, the Department of Environmental Quality, and the City of Benton Harbor, we now know that all but one of the seven conversion mitigation parcels swapped for JKP land are contaminated. The very extensive efforts of my clients to piece together the history and current status of the mitigation parcels from disparate sources yielded considerable evidence of toxic contamination on 6 of them with volatile organic chemicals (VOCs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and heavy metals, much of which as of the date of this letter remains unremediated and uncontained in the land and groundwater of several of the parcels.

“The concealment is breathtaking,” he wrote, and he asked that permits for work on the project be revoked.

Lodge also noted that despite claims that the dunes would not be damaged by the golf project, developers have recently acknowledged plans to remove 18,000 cubic yards of sand and soil from Jean Klock Park.

Army Corps spokeswoman Lynn Duerod said that permits can be revoked or rescinded if the permit applicant fails to comply with the permit, if the information in the permit application proves to be false, or if significant new information surfaces that wasn’t considered when the permit was issued. The Corps has not yet issued a response to the request to stop Harbor Shores’ progress.

In a statement released in response to questions about contamination of the proposed park parcels, Harbor Shores spokeswoman Wendy Dant Chesser did not specifically address concerns about the presence of heavy metals, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) but stated: “Harbor Shores has already agreed to perform significant environmental remediation to dramatically improve the condition of the parcels.”

She acknowledged that 18,000 cubic yards of sand and soil would be removed from the park.

Chesser emphasized government support for the project: “Thanks to the leadership of Benton Harbor, St. Joseph, Benton Charter Township, Berrien County, and other supporters, the use of Jean Klock Park has been approved by all local, state and federal agencies that have jurisdiction over the Park.”

The release also stated that the golf course is part of a 530-acre mixed-use development intended to benefit the people of Benton Harbor and that the project has been granted more than $3 million dollars for road-building by the state of Michigan.