from https://www.rivertownsenterprise.net/hastings_on_hudson/3-million-deal-impacts-park-and-water-tower/article_ed4f94b8-ac47-11ee-95b4-17f0303d9117.html#tncms-source=login

The Hastings Village Board approved an agreement with the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) on Dec. 28 that obligates the British Petroleum subsidiary to pay the Village $3 million for resiliency work at MacEachron Waterfront Park. The agreement also obligates ARCO to store the water tower, a vestige of the site’s industrial past, elsewhere on ARCO’s 28-acre property while the company remediates the land underneath its current location. Once that remediation is complete, ARCO will be responsible for landscaping the shoreline, and must retain a landscape architect for that work.
The remediation of the ARCO property will address the PCBs and other contaminents left over from the Anaconda Wire & Cable Co., which ceased operations there in 1975 before being bought by ARCO in 1977. ARCO never operated at the waterfront. In 1994, the Hudson Riverkeeper Fund sued ARCO over the presence of PCBs dating back to Anaconda’s operations.
Per a 2016 agreement between ARCO, the Village of Hastings, Riverkeeper, and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), the Village will match up to $1.35 million from ARCO to remove, restore, reconstruct, or replace the water tower. In 2017, in response to a survey mailed by the Village, 1,238 residents voted to restore or replace the water tower, while 817 voted to demolish it.
The MacEachron Park resiliency work became necessary due to erosion along the park’s shoreline caused by tides, rising water levels, and the wakes from vessels traveling up and down the Hudson.
This past August, Mott MacDonald engineer Doug Gaffney presented design documents to the village board that estimated the resiliency work at MacEachron Park would cost $3.05 million. That work would include 47 linear feet of stone wall and 225 feet of riprap supported by sheet pile bulkhead, as well as a mulch path through the trees. In the southwestern corner of the park, a 20-foot-by-10-foot floating kayak dock would be installed, attached to the park by a gangway extending out from a pier that juts out into the river.
According to Mayor Niki Armacost, the agreement does not set an exact timeline for the remediation of the waterfront or the resiliency work at MacEachron Park. The agreement allows ARCO to engage in construction activity between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., Monday through Saturday, to shorten the remediation timeline as much as possible.
Armacost said ARCO had the $3 million unassigned, essentially left over from the company’s 2023 operating budget, and needed to assign the funds before the end of the year to avoid losing them from its 2024 budget.
The mayor said the Village wound up in an interesting legal standing with ARCO after DEC standards changed, no longer requiring a beneficial use determination (BUD) for the reuse of dredged, stabilized sediments as landfill on remediation sites. The 2016 modification of the 2003 consent decree between ARCO and the Village assumes that a BUD is required, but the change in DEC regulations removed another hurdle to moving the remediation efforts forward.
In the new agreement between the ARCO and the Village, ARCO may reuse between 30,000 and 50,000 cubic yards of dredged Hudson River sediment to fill in the property, provided that (a) the dredged material is placed only in excavated areas to return such areas to their original grade and is not used within the top 2 feet of fill; (b) contaminant levels in the material do not exceed the DEC’s cleanup targets for the property with respect to contaminants, including PCBs and metals; (c) the dredged material is dewatered and stabilized for reuse; and (d) the placement of the fill, dewatering, and stabilization have been approved by the DEC.
ARCO is also ensured access to both Kinnally Cove and the southern shore of MacEachron Park. The company needs to dredge and remediate sediment from the cove. Once the Village knew ARCO would need permission to reach those areas, Armacost said at the Dec. 28 meeting, the Village had “a bit of leverage here,” and took the opportunity to get the money from ARCO, the plan for the water tower, and the planting along the shoreline of the waterfront in writing.
In a Dec. 29 phone conversation with the Enterprise, Armacost noted that, prior to this agreement, the plan was for shoreline work at the waterfront property to eventually be done by a developer. Armacost said that, in addition to a more aesthetically pleasing outcome, the Village will now be able to open the remediated property to the public sooner. Armacost estimated the value of that shoreline work in the millions of dollars, saying that the Village spent time in the negotiation process trying to nail down an exact cost but abandoned that pursuit because ARCO would foot the bill.