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32A_241M 115 Bridge Street ConservationMemo: Friday, May 06, 2005 Northampton Planning Office Bruce and Wayne: I thought it might be helpful for me to give you a bit of background regarding our garden beds and the pond behind our house at 115 Bridge Street. This is obviously a difficult circumstance for us and we're hoping you can help guide us to the best possible outcome. The Horton's: Sarah and I moved to Northampton in 1999 with our nine month old (Emma) having purchased the "Woodruff House", which was in very rough condition. The property included a 3,000 sq.ft house a four story barn and a bit more than four acres of land. Sarah has a master's degree in early childhood development and taught at the Ethical Culture School in NYC for a decade. Until the year before we moved, I was a program director at the Rodale Institute (popularized organic horticulture) and had recently begun work at the Trust for Sustainable Development. You may remember that we were the low bidding masterplan developers for the Hospital property in Northampton. I have spent the past five years working on a project in Mexico () and recently started my own resort development company (www canopydevelopment.com). I mention this history to point out that we are highly sensitized to land -use and conservation issues, children, and avid organic growers, deriving much of our diet from food we grow in our own gardens. In the past five years, we have invested more than $400,000 in the property, funds borrowed from the equity in our home, to upgrade all of the systems, remove the asbestos, and repair the foundation of the barn, which was structurally unsafe. In 1999 we had our second child, Georgia was born, and soon there after we began to have our children tested for lead. Both children registered alarmingly high lead levels and in the ensuing three years, we have spent more than $120,000 in remediation of the lead in our home. This included the replacement of nearly all of our (27) windows, having our woodwork and entire house exterior hand scraped and painted with epoxy based paint, top soiling around our house, covering the entire barn with metal siding, and having the house deep cleaned by Service Master every six months. The efforts have paid off and the lead levels in all three of our children (we now have a third — Charlie) are in normal ranges. As of last fall we thought we were in the clear with regard to lead. The Gardens: Saran and I have always looked for ways to support local sustainable food production in the community and last fall found a wonderful young couple who were moving in the house three doors down, who were interested in doing commercial vegetable gardening on our property. We offered to provide up to two acres of land the capital to get them started. They purchased dairy goats and planted fall crops such as garlic and rhubarb. They also had the soil tested at UMASS so that we could add the appropriate soil amendments. The gardens were to be exactly where we had been growing vegetables for our family for the past five years and the property just behind it. The soil tests came back with alarmingly high lead levels at nearly every spot in our back year. I called someone at the UMASS extension service and began to ask some questions. After a short conversation, he began to ask if we had found any "clunkers" or fly -ash while digging in the back yard. Indeed there are clunkers and chunks of coal evident at and below the surface of our yard. He informed me that this is almost certainly the source of the lead contamination on our property and that it's a real issue in most industrial era New England towns. I began to make some calls about how to best address the issue as we are committed to both protecting our family from these contaminates and growing our own food organically. What I learned from soil scientist friends I know through Rodale and friends who do urban farming in NYC was to create a drainage barrier (crushed stone) between the soil and raised planting beds as the lead would migrate into new soil primarily through moving water. The removed soil should be top applied on our property, covered with new clean soil and planted with woody plants (trees) which will remove the lead through it's vascular system over a number of years. The soil between the trees should be seeded down to avoid migration (through wind blown soil) of the soil once it dries out. Indeed, I recently spoke with the individual at MASS DEP responsible for this type of contamination in Western Massachusetts, and he agreed that this approach probably made the most sense. He said that this is a very widespread problem that most homeowners and for that mater municipalities were not equipped to manage the DEP protocol for treating lead contamination in the soil on this scale. Further, were DEP called in, its mandate would be to remove all of the contaminated soil to a registered landfill and that this solution could (and has) bankrupt most homeowners. He said the regulations around contamination from coal residuals found on residential properties are currently being reviewed by both the EPA and DEP as the current regulations are probably not practical. I asked him, off the record, what he would do were he in my circumstance. He said candidly, he probably do exactly the same thing — quickly and quietly. He said, to make yourself feel a bit better, walk around your neighborhood and look for "clunkers". When you find them on the ground, you can be pretty sure there is lead contamination near by. So I did. I found them in the fields adjacent to my house, in the front yard of both of my neighbors, on the school grounds of Bridge Street School where my daughter Emma attends school, on the ground in the park next to the Academy of Music, on the sports fields behind Smith College. This was on casual walks with my children over the past couple of days. I have to admit that I did not give any thought to the floodplain and what you could or could not do there. It just did not occur to me. I guess I assumed that if was agricultural related and not the construction of a building, it was OK. As you can see from the attached photos of my immediate neighbors there are large piles of debris, junked automobiles, decaying homes, and off buildings, and blatant point source pollution from agriculture all within a few hundred feet of my home. These seem to OK uses, so raised planting beds did not seem like it should be an issue. As mentioned above, we have done five years of redevelopment on our home. I have meticulously applied for building, electrical and plumbing permits for all of the work that I have done and the building inspectors have been on my property and in the back yard a dozen times in the past eight months and over the many years we have owned the property. No one has pointed out to me that this could be an issue. Had I known it would be an issue, I obviously would not have taken the course that I did. The pond: As I mentioned to you on the phone Bruce, we adopted the small pond in our back yard when we bought the house. At the time, it was about 6-7' in diameter and apparently hand dug. There was a metal culvert from the back of the barn leading to the pond and another culvert leading to a drainage ditch at the back of the property. Both culverts were rusted and caved in and the pond reverted into a mushy mud puddle in mid -July. On the entire bottom of the barn (30'x30') there was more than of foot of standing water, which was contributing the rapid decay of the barns' foundation. Soon after we close on the house, I repaired the culverts and expanded the edges of the pond to approximately 10'. I did this because there is a spring in the bottom of the barn that flows at more than gallon a minuet and once the culverts were repaired, it began to overflow the pond. The pond remained that way e.g. stable and several feet deep for the past five years and supports 30-40 rainbow trout (I loose 10 or more per year to the herons), a family of mallards and about a thousand very noisy frogs. The pond remained that size over the past five years and as I mentioned above, the building inspectors have been on the property every year many times each year and have no doubt noticed the pond. This year, because we had someone working in the backyard to build the planting beds, I had the edges of the pond graded, and we put down flagstone and sand so that it would be safer for our children. Previously, the pond had sharp muddy edges and we were worried that if a child fell in, they would not be able to climb out. This had a marginal effect on the size of the pond, but does make it a good deal more prominent than it has been. I have printed out the City of Northampton —Wetlands Application from your web site and have begun to gather the information that I need to fill it out. I had no idea that the floodplain was a classified wetland. As there are dozens of residences and an airport in the area, it seems at odds with my understanding of wetlands regulations. At any rate, I will look forward to meeting with you on Thursday at 8PM. If you have any ideas or advice prior to that meeting, it would be much appreciated. Warm regards, Tom Horton ik lr (%t% ��1'�i� ji'J�� a ta ✓ vk &I