By SHELLY GARCIA

Staff Reporter

For more than four years, residents and officials of the city of Santa Clarita have waited and watched as government and industry worked to clean up a 1,000-acre parcel contaminated by years of munitions manufacturing on the site.

Now a new owner is pledging to get the job done.

Remediation Financial, a Phoenix-based developer, last month acquired the property from Whittaker Corp. for about $15 million. It plans to turn the toxic wasteland into a community of nearly 3,000 homes and apartments with a Main Street-style shopping district, roads, parks and hiking trails.

The 10-year-old company has an unusual specialty: It only buys what it calls “environmentally challenged” properties and restores them for new development. Remediation Financial officials say the site, called Porta Bella, is salvageable.

At least some residents remain skeptical. “We’ve been told that before,” said Carl Kanowsky, an attorney and homeowner in the neighboring Circle J development. “The attorney for the (last) developer said the toxic problem amounted to a few dirty rags on the ground. He’s been proven to be quite wrong on that, so we want to make sure this effort is as thorough and complete as possible.”

To help ensure that, Circle J residents have formed a watchdog group to monitor the Porta Bella project.

For more than 50 years, ammunition and weaponry for the military had been manufactured on the site, which runs south from Soledad Canyon Road and west from San Fernando Road. Most recently, those manufacturing activities were conducted by the Bermite Powder Co. division of Whittaker. The plant has been closed since the mid-’80s, and in 1994, Whittaker began trying to identify the types of chemicals and other contaminants in the area and assess the extent to which the soil and groundwater has been affected.

Initially, Whittaker intended to develop Porta Bella with a real estate partner, but it ultimately decided to sell so it could focus on its core aerospace business.

The sale left the inquiry incomplete. “(Whittaker) found contamination, but they didn’t find the extent,” said Sara Amir, unit chief for Southern California cleanup operations of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Department of Toxic Substances Control. “We need to determine how far the contaminants have gone down and how far (they reach) horizontally.”

What’s especially worrisome to residents like Kanowsky, though, is that despite years of testing, no one yet has a clear idea of the time or money that will be required to clean up Porta Bella.

“What we’re concerned about is Cal EPA (the California Environmental Protection Agency) comes out and has public forums, and every time it happens, there are new things that are discovered,” Kanowsky said.

The EPA has found at least 77 contaminated areas, including what may be the most troubling contaminant so far: Ammonium perchlorate, a chemical used in the manufacture of flares and solid rocket fuel that has seeped into the groundwater. That discovery persuaded Santa Clarita Water Co. and Newhall County Water District to shut down three of their wells.

The toxic characteristics of perchlorate, which at certain levels is believed to affect the thyroid, have only recently been identified. There are no proven technologies to remove it from the water supply.

“Perchlorate is something new in the world of environmental contamination,” said Ali Tabidian, a geologist and professor of hydrogeology at Cal State Northridge. “They’ve only detected it in recent years, so there’s no established technology to treat it.”

Tabidian, who says he is not familiar with the Porta Bella site, said that in general, once contaminants have seeped into the groundwater, the problems tend to increase exponentially. “The more they look at a problem, the more problems they find and the more complicated it gets,” Tabidian said. “For these military bases and industrial sites, we’re talking about tens of years and tens of millions of dollars.”

Officials with the EPA’s Department of Toxic Substances Control are not quite as pessimistic. They say that if the source of the perchlorate contamination is found, it can be eliminated by excavating the area. Even so, agency officials point out that the problems at Porta Bella are extensive, and it could be four or five years before the land is restored to a condition that would allow development.

“It would be very naive to think these sites are low problems,” said Amir. “When we get involved with these sites, we know there is going to be a lot of contamination.”

Remediation Financial executives said they have a good understanding of the issues and costs involved, thanks to 10 years of experience with these types of cleanups.

The company restored a 25-acre site in Chandler, Ariz. that was once used for an automobile-shredding operation. The site now houses a retail shopping center, restaurants and an automobile dealership. Remediation Financial also restored a 12-acre site where a manufacturing facility had caused contaminants to seep into the groundwater. A new industrial development is now being constructed on the site.

Jerry Swerdlow, Financial Remediation’s senior vice president, said the company met with EPA officials for over a year prior to the Porta Bella acquisition and has developed an understanding of what is involved in the cleanup, though he would not detail the company’s estimates.

“We do a significant amount of due diligence to determine what we believe the costs are going to be to clean the property to a developable state,” he said.

Swerdlow said he’s not concerned about the history of the site and the failure of efforts so far because he believes the company has a high level of experience. “You need the expertise that we have put together, and you need the team we have assembled,” he said.

Nonetheless, Swerdlow concedes that it could take some time before Porta Bella is built out. “We may run into things that we’re not aware of right now,” he said. “It could take at least a year to review and go through all the tests and analysis that is necessary, and at that point, the determination will be made.”

Meanwhile, the surrounding community is torn between its concern about the potential problems of development on the site, and the promise of new roadways it would receive if the development goes through.

As part of the development agreement, Remediation Financial will build an east-west roadway that would provide a much-needed alternative to Soledad Canyon Road, which criss-crosses the Santa Clarita River with bridges that could fail in an emergency. “If there’s a natural disaster, it gets very difficult to get across the valley,” said Ken Pulskamp, assistant city manager. “We have a hospital on the west side, so we need another way to get there.”

At the same time, Porta Bella would provide a town center for the city, with shops and recreation areas.

“We’re anxious to get it cleaned up as soon as possible so we can start building the roads,” said Jo Anne Darcy, Santa Clarita’s mayor.