New Paltz land found to be contaminated with pesticides and metals, delaying development

Before a state-of-the-art county emergency management center is constructed between South Ohioville Road and the state Thruway in New Paltz, state environmental officials want to see contamination on the property addressed. A fact sheet, developed by the county planning department and consultants for developer Steve Turk, was released last Wednesday in a State Department of Environmental Conservation bulletin. It disclosed that “pesticides and metals were detected at the site in soils at concentrations above applicable soil cleanup objectives.” Once the state environmental review is complete, county officials will submit a cleanup plan which will be subject to public comment. 

Contaminants were found to soil depths as low as three feet on the 57-acre property, six acres of which will be used for the emergency center. The property, purchased in March of 2023 for $3 million of county taxpayer money, was an orchard for decades starting no later than 1955, and has been a focus of redevelopment agendas since the 1990s. There were plans to site a Walmart there, and then a complex that would have included a mix of high-priced apartments and high-end retail shops, and more recently an event venue was proposed that could have included a water park or a butterfly conservatory. For many years there was also an interest in tapping into an aquifer about 600 feet down to bolster the local water supply; it was too deep to have been contaminated by orchard activity, but was discovered to have been contaminated with high levels of salt. The source of that contamination has not been reported, and it’s not known if it is connected to the fact that the Thruway runs along the property line. 

Once there’s a final report on the state of the property, and a cleanup plan is created, members of the public will have 45 days to weigh in. The cleanup itself will be supervised by environmental and health officials from state government. 

Additional site details, including environmental and health assessment summaries, are available on NYSDEC’s Environmental Site Remediation Database (by entering the site ID, C356053) at: https://www.dec.ny.gov/cfmx/extapps/derexternal/index.cfm?pageid=3.