The Environmental Protection Agency announced this morning that it would declare the fetid Gowanus Canal a federal Superfund site.

The controversial designation sets into motion a half-billion-dollar, decade-long federally overseen clean-up of the polluted waterway, which cuts a sclerotic artery through the gentrifying heart of Brownstone Brooklyn. But it also raises questions about whether developers, who currently yearn to build residential housing in the canal zone, will ever exhibit quite the same ardor now that the area has been deemed one of the most polluted places in the country.

“This site has a very long legacy of toxic pollution that plagues this urban waterway,” said Judith Enck, the EPA’s regional director. “And because of that, the EPA is saying it is adding the Gowanus Canal to the federal Superfund list. We believe it will get us the most efficient and comprehensive cleanup of this waterway.”

Enck started her statement by declaring that taxpayers should rest easy that the feds went with a Superfund designation, which sets into motion a process of getting restitution from responsible polluters.

“The goal of Superfund is to ensure that polluters pay for cleanup, not the taxpayer,” she said.

Along the canal, however, EPA has identified nine responsible parties, including National Grid, Con Ed, several petroleum companies, the U.S. Navy and the city of New York.

As a result of the city and Navy involvement, Enck was asked, won’t taxpayers be nailed for the clean-up?

“Yes, absolutely,” she said, “but only part of the bill.”

She defended the Superfund method because it puts a legal requirement that polluters pay.

“If the Navy and the city have polluted, they have a legal obligation to pay,” she said.

Enck said the clean-up would take “10 to 12 years — perhaps not fast enough for some, but it took many, many decades for this pollution to occur, so give us a decade.”

There are limits to what a Superfund designation can accomplish along the 1.8-mile canal, which runs from Butler Street to Gowanus Bay.

Only a portion of the canal bed — where a thick muck of chemicals lies undisturbed — is expected to be dredged, though EPA’s regional Superfund administrator Walter Mugdan said that further investigation could indicate that the entire canal must be dredged.

And the EPA’s clean-up would not cure the canal’s most malodorous problem: the millions of gallons of raw sewage that flow into it during heavy rainstorms, a remnant of the city’s antiquated sewer systems. He did say that the city and state are already working on the multi-billion problem, and that EPA would monitor their success.

“If there is any ongoing pollution entering the canal, those sources have to be shut off and eliminated,” he said, mentioning that there are 214 pipes that empty unidentified material into the canal. “We don’t want to clean up the mud only to have it be recontaminated. If there are toxic chemicals, we will track back and make sure that they are stopped.”

Under questioning from reporters, Enck explained how the agency came up with the 10- to 12-year timeline — and the $300- to $500-million expected cost.

By the end of this year, the agency will complete a “remediation investigation and human-risk assessment,” she said.

After that, it will take another year to complete a “feasibility study to examine clean-up options,” she said.

By the end of 2012, the agency will select a remedy plan. Then, by the end of 2014, that plan is designed.

It would be implemented over the next five years, she added — “and we’ve added two years [more] as contingency.”

“I wish [the clean-up could be completed] sooner, but this is a complicated site,” Enck added. “We will move as quickly as we can, but we need to be honest with the public.”

Mugdan explained that there are serious questions about how best to remedy the situation.

“There are questions about how deep we should dredge,” he said. “Do you then back-fill with clean material? How do you deal with crumbling bulkheads along the canal. [What about] ongoing groundwater migration? These are technically difficult questions that we will be answering.”

The canal has been a polluted wasteland for more than a century — and talk of cleaning it up are nearly as old. But the process was jumpstarted last April, when the EPA announced that it was considering adding the canal to the so-called National Priorities List.

Around the same time, Mayor Bloomberg declared himself an opponent of Superfund designation, claiming that he had a better, faster and cheaper plan to clean the waterway using existing federal programs, such as the Water Resources Development Act, which would involve the Army Corps of Engineers. Opponents deride the mayor’s effort as too little, too late — and too underfunded, because such a clean-up would require annual budget allocations from the federal government.

Enck specifically addressed that in her statement on Tuesday.

“This [clean-up] is going to cost a lot of money,” she said. “This is not the sort of thing you can go to Congress every year and get an earmark for.”

She claimed that EPA’s research into funding indicated that the Water Resources Development Act has an annual budget of roughly $50 million.

“And that’s for the entire country,” Enck said. “Clearly, that was not enough money. … I was not relishing going to Congress every year to get funding.”

Complicating the clean-up are some political realities: The Bloomberg administration wants to rezone the mostly industrial canal zone into a mixed-use community of manufacturers side-by-side with thousands of new residential units. One key development company, Toll Brothers, envisions a 450-unit canal-side complex with a waterfront esplanade.

But the company publicly announced last year that the project is dead in the water if EPA went ahead with a Superfund designation.

Plus, the history of the federal Superfund is certainly a checkered one. Many clean-ups took decades longer than original promised and have cost far more than originally budgeted. But other sites were cleaned successfully after decades of neglect.

The term “Superfund” is a bit of misnomer, however. Despite its name, the Superfund is not a pool of money that federal officials tap into for environmental remediation. In fact, one goal of Superfund designation is to identify guilty polluters and get them to pay to clean up toxic sites.

And there is a history of towns and municipalities being forced by the EPA to open up their checkbooks to pay for decontaminating polluted land. Last February, for example, the upstate cities of Poughkeepsie and Newburgh were held responsible for hazardous material on a car and metal processing plant, and had to cough up $12 million.

And as officials said, the city and the U.S. Navy could be hit with a bill for the Gowanus clean-up.

Enck denied that a Superfund clean-up has a stigma that is insurmountable.

“I believe that cleaning up waterways helps to build neighborhoods.” she said. “I’ve heard that people say there is a ‘Superfund’ stigma, but there already is a stigma. Everyone in Brooklyn knows that the Gowanus is heavily contaminated. I can’t speak to the Toll Brothers [comment], but when the site is remediated, there will be even more development opportunities.

“I reject the notion that listing this as a Superfund site [prevents] development from going forward.”

She denied a report put out by an anti-Superfund group that federally backed mortgages will no longer be available within 3,000 feet of an EPA-designated waterway, saying that the Department of Housing and Urban Development will still back mortgages if the environmental damage is properly mitigated.

In the end, Enck likened the Gowanus Canal to the Hudson River before it was declared a Superfund site two decades ago.

“Back then, no one would have lived on the banks of the Hudson,” she said. “But we made a massive commitment and now people flock to recreate and live on the shoreline — in luxury apartments that I certainly can’t afford.”

©2010 Community Newspaper Group