UNANIMOUS CONSENT

By Hal Phillips

The funding question disappears as the Monticello City Council accepts the federal buyout.

The Monticello, Utah, City Council has voted 4-0 to accept a $7.8 million government buyout that paves the way for nine new holes to be built on a federal Superfund site where the Department of Energy once operated a uranium and vanadium processing plant.

"It looks like we've got a done deal," said Monticello City Manager Trent Schafer. "Now it's a question of when we can formally take possession of the land." And there's the bureaucratic rub: Government land transfers take time, and Monticello won't receive its buyout money until it officially owns the land.

Yet Monticello did set the process in motion April 28 when the council voted to accept $7.8 million in government funds, with $6.5 million earmarked for final-stage site remediation, plus design and construction of the new nine holes that will supplement the current Blue Mountain Meadows nine. The remaining $1.3 million has been set aside to clean several private properties.

By early summer, the current land owner, the DOE, will have fulfilled the bulk of its Superfund remediation mandate, removing from the 300-acre site more than 2 million cubic yards of contaminated soil. Under terms of the buyout, Monticello will pick up where the DOE left off; the city will assume responsibility for completing the DOE's remaining clean-up obligations: long-term erosion control, restoration of five acres of wetlands, and the rechanneling of Montezuma Creek, which runs through the property. With continuing oversight from the DOE and the Environmental Protection Agency, the city will fulfill these obligations in the process of constructing nine new holes.

"The government's offer was very well received," says Schafer. "Our hearing was quite well attended; there were two residents who voiced opposition, but all other comments were positive. The Council was convinced we're going in the direction we should be going."

The $6.5 million will be available upon the formal transfer, meaning the city could see the cash by year's end, says Schafer. If that seems like a long time, welcome to the convoluted world of government land conveyance. According to Gary Munsterman of the National Park Service (NPS), before the site can be handed over to Monticello, the parcel must be transferred from the Department of Energy to the General Services Administration (GSA). The GSA offers to other government agencies those federally owned parcels slated for "disposal." If there are no takers, Monticello is free to petition the GSA for transfer of the site — from GSA to the city via the federal Lands to Parks Program.

What role does NPS play in this complicated acronym parade? The NPS administers the Lands to Parks Program, so it must sponsor Monticello's petition to the GSA, something the NPS fully intends to do, says Munsterman.

"I've already made a site trip to Monticello, and I'm confident we [the NPS] would support Monticello's application — provided all the paperwork is in order," says Munsterman. "DOE concluded long ago, quite rightly in my opinion, that there is no federal interest in this land. The Bureau of Land Management has not indicated an interest, and I can't see [Housing and Urban Development] building public housing on a site with that sort of history."

In a roundabout way, the DOE can dictate when the transfer will take place. When the DOE is ready to initiate this three-stage transfer, it must formally notify the GSA. The DOE may not want to start this process until its portion of the clean-up has been finished. Provided that happens this summer, as scheduled, Munsterman says the land could be transferred to Monticello "by mid-fall."

Good thing, because under terms of the buyout, Monticello must adhere to the same Superfund-mandated deadlines the DOE does. "We do have some time lines," says Schafer. "We must have a preliminary site design to DOE by December 1999. We plan on getting started right away, with or without the buyout money."